Disconnected at Villa Bellagio Bussy-Saint-Georges

It just gets worse

Everything that made our hotel a great relief to move to in terms of location, quality and availability of services seems to have been lost to circumstances within the control of the owners but left to decline into atrocious service.

I cannot for the life of me understand how a 4* hotel cannot have “Do not disturb” signs to put on the door that other guests tend to steal the few available from other doors to put on theirs.

In my case, I had to retrieve mine from the room next to mine and then mark it up so that it could be identified if stolen from my door again. It is unnecessary but not with housekeeping staff desperate to meet their quotas that they will enter your room if it is not barricaded.

Having the “Clean my room” sign on my door has made no difference either and I have not been able to demand something be done about it until this morning for that fact that I have been working unusual hours.

96 hours offline

What irks me most is that the hotel offers free wireless connectivity as part of their attractive package and for one it is probably the biggest reason why I will consider staying anywhere away from home.

Four days ago, the service went down but having returned to the hotel at just before 3:00AM I could not be bothered to chase up the problem until the morning. At dawn, I went to speak with the desk clerk about it and I was allowed to use the computer at the reception to send an urgent email to work.

Later, when I got to speak with the desk clerk on day duty, he simply offered the view that it was a free service to which I retorted, the free service was essentially what made their hotel attractive compared to the competition.

Lies and flies

The manager then said this was a problem with Swisscom and that more hotels were affected, we took that on face value but there was something suspicious about us not getting a signal from the access points, the problem could hardly be with Swisscom.

I got my colleague to call up Swisscom on the third day suggesting he report the problem without intimating Swisscom of what the hotel had told us before and we learnt that they were not aware of the issue.

Talking to the manager later, I tried to spare her the embarrassment of letting her know that she might have been caught in a lie by preparing her for what I was about to say. She swore Swisscom had been informed but I let her know that the problem we had in the hotel by reason of the knowledge of networks the four of us had pointed to problems in the hotel.

The truth is bitter

With our call incident number we made two further calls to Swisscom with the hope to resolve the problem and we learnt this morning that Swisscom was no more doing business with Villa Bellagio Bussy-Saint-Georges and this can only have been due to the hotel not meeting up with its obligations.

What I find most irksome is that the hotel having put out a falsehood about the state of affairs regarding wireless network connectivity stuck to the story without realising that some of their guests will indeed try to determine the root of the problem and report back their findings without mincing words.

A new sign

It is with that in mind and the fact that every advertisement about Villa Bellagio Bussy-Saint-Georges touts free wireless internet that doesn’t exist and the prospect that the next 10 days I will spend there will be as harrowing experience of being incommunicado that I have taken a picture of the sign outside the hotel and updated it with today’s reality.

A red cross over the Free WiFi offer because that is the case and until that changes, anyone who needs internet access as part of their hotel deal should consider other accommodation for now.

Getting bad attitude from one of the desk clerks and the running down of what is supposedly a 4* hotel by 0* staff having been offered a service they are making no moves to restore is just not the way I intend to spend the next week and my name will be known by the time I leave.

As always, I am not a vexatious customer, just one with a requirement that I reasonably and any one reasonable person will expect to be met.

Incredible India: Without Internet Access, Koenig Inn is a Prison

My connection was down

When in a distant land, well away from friends and family there is one bond that we take for granted because we have taken it in trust and it factored into all the decisions we made to leave the comfort of our home for the adventure which might well be the one of a lifetime.

Away from those I know, I am four and a half or 5 and a half hours ahead of their own daily timeframe, it means ones bears it in thought that one will not call to speak in the morning because they will be asleep, neither can one during the day because the overlapping times of work mean the pleasantries of interaction are reduced to more business-like conversation.

The window of opportunity between my getting to bed and they having the time to chat is reasonably around 8:00PM their time which is just after midnight here or an hour later.

In terms of cost, we have found that Skype suits us best and that needs the Internet as the carrier, its availability is critically paramount.

A prison of life

The lonely world that is framed within the confines of the little room that is a prison of convenience for a month is opened up into a vast and limitless place through the Internet which serves as the beast of burden for email, social interaction, news retrieval and again a critical research resource that underpins the reason why we have left our homes for this place.

Whatever discomforts, nostalgia, loneliness or isolation is somewhat ameliorated with the feeling that one can through this invisible but tangible medium, touch the world and be in touch – at will and without let or hindrance.

However, this night will count as one of the least comfortable I have had in a long time, the darkness settled in figurative and literal sense at the doors to the world were closed like one were in a maximum security prison.

Freedoms lost

The guards knowing we should be free could not open the prison gates and we were completely constrained, our freedom lost and the silence of the night stilled to the hearing of sounds from outer space if ones ears were so attuned.

From about 9:45PM when I noticed, the wireless connectivity between my netbook and the wireless access point was fine but the wireless access point could not take me beyond itself into the world of the Internet – it was down.

An idea for partnership

The staff could not resolve the problem and there I was, cut off and thinking fast about what other alternatives were available at the loss of this service – none easily came to mind apart from one good idea – the need for a contingency plan which should come at no additional cost.

There are many hotels that are in the vicinity of my hotel, all broadcast the presence of their wireless access points, where the service in one hotel fails, there should be an arrangement between hotels to allow for guests in other hotels to hop on their systems whilst steps are taken to expedite repairs of the service we used to have.

A rotten moment

This must be the lowest point in terms of my sense of comfort; the absence of Internet access, the last resort is to switch the SIM card in my phone back to my home SIM card and roam – not the best but this situation must definitely not happen again, it just must not, again.

No, sooner had I changed my SIM card and began to roam, my 10MB of data was used up without having done much.

Always include a number to call

No stop - Go direct

Homeward bound, one needs to rethink this whole pleasure of riding the seeming comfort of the German InterCityExpress (ICE) trains with a stop-over at Duisburg between Amsterdam and Berlin for the direct but less comfortable InterCity (IC) trains.

On my way to Berlin it was just a 20 minute stop-over but on the return, I did not realise the wait would be 73 minutes. So, one has to kill time somehow.

The need to get online is compelling though Duisburg unlike Cologne does not have the DB Lounge facility which First Class passengers can access for free beverages, comfortable seats and Internet access.

The Spartan waiting rooms in Duisburg however do have stickers indicating T-Mobile Hotspots are available for wireless internet connectivity.

I prefer blackberry muffins

I do however, have to travel with my laptop most of the time because I am still blowing raspberries at Blackberries, I prefer to determine when I am online and when I want to be contacted and if I want to be connected rather than having a device that syncopates with my breathing that being alive means one is available.

For years, I have refused to accept business phones, bleepers and alert systems because they unconscionably encroach on your private time as some people might tend to take liberties because of this.

No number? Oh! Bummer

So, to kill time at Duisburg, I put my laptop on, engaged a wireless access point but could not get an IP address, there was something wrong with the service in the station.

Some, one would expect a phone number would appear on the T-Mobile Hotspot sticker, just in case one has enquiries or something goes wrong – Zilch!

You cannot be serious (With McEnroe disdain), how do they get informed of service failure if there is no way to contact them?

It smacks of technological hubris which imagines their systems would never fail such that no one would ever have to call for anything.

The absence of a contact number is to my mind a failure of the service even if it is working and if the station information desk of personnel who never learnt English - that we were communicating with Annoying Sign Language - do not have any information about T-Mobile services in their station, the cretin who came up with this idea is deserving of a payslip without the figures.

73 minutes of being rather cross and suitably not amused, one should learn to, as they say in common parlance – chill.