The tyranny of hotels
I have just spent a couple of days in a hotel outside Kampala, said to be one of the best in its town.
The stay set me off again thinking about hotels I have known, and wondering why it seems so difficult for hotels to ‘get it right’. I am not talking about short-time lodgings which can manage with a 40 watt bulb because the guests have not come to look at the furniture, but hotels that may host consultants, staff who are coming to seminars or visit field offices and have to work, or tourists who want a comfortable rest after travelling. It should not matter whether they are Ugandans or foreigners.
Here are some thoughts based on recent experience.

Light
Why should a hotel provide rooms that look directly onto a blank wall? I have just experienced that. The room was so dark that when the power was off during the day, I needed a torch in the room. Of course no candle or alternative light was provided, and the hotel kept its generator off as long as there was the tiniest bit of daylight outside, even if it did not penetrate the rooms.

Food
Why in a country full of fruit is it usually a really hard job to get a hotel serve a decent amount of fruit with breakfast, or with any other meal for that matter? The world is moving to healthier eating, but not in our hotels it seems.
While thinking of food, why are the menus so limited in practice. You ask the waiter or waitress what actually exists, rather than bother to read the menu. Very few things are available and if that includes fresh vegetables you are very lucky.
It’s a real problem at breakfast. I happen to like soft-fried eggs (with the yolk runny), but it usually requires two days to train the kitchen to do them without doing violence to the eggs to make the universal omelette.

Or you have to discover the code word. Recently it was ‘semi-fried’. In Kenya they are called ‘macho ya ngombe’. But the mystery is why a hotel doesn’t know about them already? It is the commonest way to provide breakfast eggs in many countries.

Sockets

Is there anyone these days who stays in a hotel who does not have a mobile phone that will need to be charged?

In the last room I stayed in (the one with the wall blocking the window) there was only one socket which had to do for laptop (plenty of people have them also nowadays), fan and television.

As it happened the television did not work anyway because in building the wall the cable had been cut. No one bothered to mention that when I checked in, by the way.
Anyway the socket was on the opposite side of the room from the fan and TV and their cables were too short to reach it. After a day of requesting and waiting an extension cord was provided. But this was a fairly new hotel. Why couldn’t it have at least two sockets, even more.

Size
The builders of some hotels seem to have no idea of planning or measuring or even how big a human being is. In one room the wardrobe wouldn’t open fully because there was no space for it to do so. The room was just slightly longer than the bed. In other rooms in the same hotel that cost less, the room was also so narrow that there was no room for a table. But I must say those rooms did have a view, which would compensate for not having a television.
In another the toilet was so placed next to the wall that even a smallish person would not be able to sit there without discomfort. For us larger people it was a punishment. Just to make it worse the toilet-paper holder was well out of reach.
Oh, and then we have to remember the lodgings that provide no hook or hanger for clothes, including one hugely expensive hotel which I stayed in - in Juba, Southern Sudan.

Consultant’s ideal
Some people actually have to work when they come to a hotel. A sizeable table at working height, an upright chair, sockets as mentioned before, a table light.

Guest as victim
In Uganda if you visit someone you put yourself in your host’s hands. The host even has to give ‘permission’ for you to leave. Some hotels go further than that and treat the visitor as their prisoner or victim.
From the staff who hang around the lounge shutting the bar and waiting for you to go to bed so they can lock up, to the hotel in Mbarara which was unable to provide breakfast before 8 a.m. because that is when the manager came in and he had the keys to the fridge.
So if you have to leave early or start work early, then there is no breakfast for you (though you have probably paid for it).

There was a hotel in the west where they did not switch the water on in the morning though the majority of its guests wanted to get to Queen Elisabeth park in the early morning; another that switched the water-heater off early in the evening.

Running on the cheap
Some of it is just running the hotel on a shoe-string.
Hotels that have only one set of towels, so when you go out they wash them and you need to wait until the evening if you need a towel.
Hotels that won’t employ qualified staff or provide their staff with training.
Hotels that think a 100 watt bulb is a waste of money or that a tiny piece of soap the size of a matchbox will do for 24 hours.

The hotel in Rwanda where the TVs in all the bedrooms show only the programme that the people in the lounge want to watch.

Lack of communication
Many guests don’t bother to express their desire for improvement, perhaps because they know it gets nowhere.

The problem is made worse by the serious lack of communication between the junior staff and the management. Most junior staff I have talked to are frightened of telling the management what the guests are complaining about, and they seem to have no book for recording complaints. Everything is ‘solved’ ad hoc’.

Anyway, the manager is rarely in the hotel. If a manager comes in he or she seems unable to try to experience his hotel from the point of view of the victim, sorry prisoner, sorry guest.
In one hotel recently almost every visitor tripped on the staircase. Why? Because the steps were all of different heights. Why was such a staircase accepted from the builders? Was I the only one who noticed the problem, even though one visitor fell quite badly?

In another, breakfast was seriously late every morning because not enough food was released at once to the cooks. The manager, when we managed to track him down, seemed to regard us as the nuisance and then started blaming the waiters and the cooks.

Ugandans are too tolerant!