I arrived late in Delhi, and only spent the night, flying out the next day.¹ Delhi is, not surprisingly, still loud, still crowded, and still polluted in the ways which bothered me when I was here a few days ago.

I’m learning² that, despite the global reach of hotel booking websites, there’s a huge variance in hotel quality from one country to another. Some of it is kind of a global step-down, where what ranks as four stars in one country ranks as three stars in another.³ But it goes beyond that, even. It shows up the most in budget hotels, which (given my budget) is where I usually try to stay. I don’t need fancy towels or decent room service or big fluffy pillows.⁴ What I need is a quiet room, decent climate controls, a working shower, and solid Wi-Fi. The rest is negotiable. Or, I thought it was.

But it turns out sliding down far enough on the “budget” options somewhere that’s already comparatively inexpensive leads some weird places. The hotel I just stayed at, for example. There’s no door to the hotel. You walk directly from the street onto the stairs to the basement or each floor of the hotel. Meaning anybody could walk off the street and be standing outside your door. That’s not to say there’s no security; there’s a metal detector standing directly on the stairs up. It went off every time I went through. Not that anyone was paying attention, which is fair, since you could just go downstairs and catch the elevator up without passing through anything.

What else? Check-in is in the basement. The WiFi, which was surprisingly strong and stable, also cut out any time I closed the door to my room. There were no windows in the room. The whole hotel was clearly converted from some other purpose — the sink in my room was built out of plywood and formica. The bathroom was that all-in-one shower/toilet/sink space that I’ve noticed is so common throughout the Middle East,⁵ so there’s no curtain or lining or plastic dividing the room into the part that’s supposed to get wet when you shower and the part that isn’t, and I’m a little disturbed at the fact the drain was on the opposite side of the room to both the toilet and the shower. I’d be more put out by the shower design, but the water didn’t even bother to get lukewarm, so I skipped a shower this morning. Two of the switches in the main room were hooked to what I guess was intended as a nightlight but in practice was a vivid ’80s style neon purple effect.

I didn’t sleep well, nightlight on or off.

I’m not sure what exactly is happening here; I guess I’ve been assuming an expensive hotel in a expensive market maintains a kind of parity with a moderately priced hotel in a moderately priced market and a cheap hotel in a cheap market. If a luxury hotel costs $250/night in city X and $200/night in city Y, then a hotel priced at $100/night in city X should cost $80/night in city Y, and that would apply up and down the scale.

That’s clearly not happening here. Maybe you reach a point where the sensibilities of travelers⁶ are so insensitive to the marginal difference between two hotels⁷ that those rules don’t apply. Maybe there’s really nothing between the cheap and the expensive options. Maybe there’s widespread cheating on the review sites. Maybe it’s all the above.

Personally, I’ve made two changes. First, in the wake of being sick, I rebooked all my later India travel, and picked nicer places. Second, in the future, I think I’m more likely to target a single price and find the best thing for around that in any given market, with few adjustments. I’ll be more likely to be staying in expensive places in cheap markets, and cheap places in expensive markets, but I’m hoping I’ll avoid these sorts of things in the future.

Next: Bangalore (BLR) to Mumbai (BOM)
Prev: Agra to Delhi

Footnotes

¹ Ridiculously late, the next day, it appears. I can’t recall if I booked this 17:45 flight because it was significantly cheaper than the other options, but I’m really wishing I had booked at least an early afternoon flight. My suspicion is that I’m overly wowed by a flight that’s 25% cheaper than another option, even when that difference turns out to actually be $15.

It’s the same sort of stupidity that leads people to fly into Stansted to save £40, then spend the same plus two hours of their lives trying to get to London. Killer travel app idea: allow people to customize an “opportunity cost” to airports. Provide defaults based on average train or taxi costs to downtown. Include that in the fares you show when you search.

² Slowly, admittedly

³ You’ll see the same sort of thing to a lesser degree in cities, where what counts as a “top tier” hotel someplace like Omaha struggles to rank in Los Angeles or Chicago. I suppose it’s not unlike growing up in a tiny town where the nicest restaurant is a Shoney’s, so that’s where everyone goes on dates.

⁴ Don’t get me wrong, I will gladly take all of the above. But I’m generally quite reluctant to pay for all that, especially since I spend so much time living out of hotels.

⁵ And yes, I understand why there’s that weird spray nozzle by the side of the toilet everywhere.

⁶ In this case, people who want to stay close to the airport, so airplane travelers

⁷ Most of these rooms are listed between ₹900 and ₹1200, which is a range of about $12 to $17.