Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces
Oxford House
15/17 N.F. Road
Apollo Bunder
Mumbai 400 001 India

December 4, 2004

To whom it may concern:

We wish to inform you of a completely unsatisfactory experience we had on November 16, 2004 at the Lake Palace Hotel in Udaipur, India, during a three-week tour of the country. We made our reservations months in advance paid fully for our room and had a voucher in hand that proof of our reservation. When we arrived at the hotel we were told that our reservation had been canceled. On their own, the hotel had booked us into another hotel, although the whole purpose of our visit to Udaipur was to revisit the Lake Palace Hotel where one of us had stayed 15 years previously while on a Fulbright Scholarship trip with other educators. We were lied to about our reservation, treated very shabbily, no apologies were given to us and we were expected to simply go away quietly.

Later we learned that it is not unusual for the hotel to double book rooms and then bump people at the hotel's discretion without any advance warning. In fact, we observed another couple getting the same treatment by the hotel staff while our concerns were being dismissed and our luggage had been relegated to the sidewalk outside the hotel in an effort to hasten our departure.

Apparently it is common knowledge among travel agencies in India that the Lake Palace has changed its management and practices and has become "unprofessional" and a "bad hotel" (in the words of several guides and travel agency representatives with whom we spoke).

We also became aware that the hotel is no longer in the middle of a lake, due to drought conditions for the last ten years, and we believe that the photographs of the Lake Palace Hotel on various websites is misleading and probably constitutes false advertising.

We are still very angry about our experience and will be writing about it on our travel website. Also, we have contacted several widely read travel magazines about our experience. We feel that it is our duty to inform other travelers so that they don't experience the same kind of disappointment and poor treatment that we had at the hands of the staff at the Lake Palace Hotel.

We realize that nothing can be done at this point to rectify the actions of the hotel management at the Lake Palace Hotel. However, we want to bring this matter to your attention and would appreciate a response to this message. Any response that might mitigate our experience will also be shared with our readers.