Beautiful hotel and you will feel you are staying in a old Palace. This hotel was constructed only five years back. Good Food. Spacious Rooms. Pure Veg hotel. For TV lovers, No TV in room.

Third visit to the hotel and it is still well maintained . Great vegetarian food.....very comfortable rooms and efficient service. The hotel though newly constructed, has a lot of charm. Built in the local Indo Saracenic style of the turn of the 20th century..it looks like one of the palaces of Bikaner. Only draw back is the location which is a few kilometers from town...but one does sleep very well as it is really quiet. Staff are very friendly and efficient...and the owners do take a lot of interest in the running of the hotel which helps in maintaining the standards

We were booked into Samode Haveli with our small tour group, but we were bumped and offered alternative accommodation at another of the proprietor's properties.

Location was the main problem - Gaj Kesri is 10 kilometres from Bikaner on the town bypass road (from the look of the developments pegged nearby, the town is expected to spread out there sometime in the future). The surrounding country held no appeal or interest.

It's a faux palace style place, and has a "flash" feel about it. It really seems to have been designed for business conventions and large tour groups - it's not an intimate environment, although it was clean and comfortable. It was brand spanking new when we stayed - so new, in fact, that the TVs still had not been installed.

We didn't like the way we were only able to have a set three course meal for dinner - there was hardly a handy nearby alternative if you wanted to eat light. In addition, the 30% service charge added when we got our bill on checkout actually made the meal quite expensive.

The staff were helpful enough - they outnumbered us because we seemed to be the only people there on the two nights we stayed. It was so quiet, it was like a mausoleum with all that marble in the halls. For the moment, I would give them the benefit of the doubt that it was empty because it was new.

However, I would NOT stay there again and would not recommend it to anybody looking for a well-located and characterful base for exploring Bikaner and its surrounds.