The hotel is worth your money... Not excellent but surely good value....However, the only thing that puts you off is the location...Its in congested area of Mumbai.

Even though I am a US citizen now, I had grown up in India. So I knew that Mumbai (Bombay) airport and the businesses surrounding that is a seedy place with all sorts of scams. My experience in 2008 April re-confirmed the feeling. Advance warning to fellow travelers: Make sure you book your hotel/travel online or through trusted agents ahead of time. Don’t expect ANY of the local ‘help’ to be trustworthy; no matter how ‘official’ they look. Even better, avoid traveling through Mumbai if you can! Other airports like Bangalore and Chennai seem to have fewer of such scams.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find a reasonable hotel (in the INR 2000-3000 per night range, or $60) in 1 hour of searching online before I landed in Mumbai. I also didn’t know a good travel agent that I could trust. A guy standing next to the computer terminal for hotel reservations at the Mumbai domestic terminal was behaving like a peddler for his favorite hotel than a helpful concierge. He seemed to outright rude when I told him that I was not interested in using his ‘recommendation’.

So, I ended up knocking the door of the ‘hotel reservation’ counter at Terminal 2A(?) at the Mumbai International airport. The two guys there seemed friendly and eager to help. They showed a pre-printed list of hotels and the rates, which looked a bit pricey (INR 3000-10000 and up). They said ‘Metro International’ is close by and they will give pickup/drop-off to the airport. The rate they showed in the page was INR 4000. I had no way of verifying that the rate was accurate.

The guy then pretended to make a call to ‘Sandeep(?)’ at the hotel to make sure that a room is available. After keeping the phone down, he said that the room is available for INR 4000 and that he could ‘try’ to get a discount *if* I was willing to give him part of the savings. I was a bit desperate because it didn’t want to blow my budget. It was 10:00PM local time and I was tired from all-day travel. So, I agreed to try for a discount. He then called ‘Sandeep(?)’ again and asked what rate he can give for a ‘company guest’. He then put the phone down and told me that I can get the room for INR 2500. I liked the savings. The two guys at the counter wanted INR 1000 from me for the ‘savings’ they got for me. I was able to get out by paying them INR 500. Their excuse was that they were poorly paid and needed such ‘tips’ to make a living etc etc. They also insisted that I shouldn’t mention this discount to anyone at the hotel.

After about 30 minutes of waiting, I was picked up by the hotel car. I reached the hotel and found the room to be of very poor quality. The bed looked cheaper than the cheapest one I have ever seen in a cheap motel. But I was glad that there were no mosquitoes, rats, bad smell or noise (typical in Mumbai hotels). I was able to sleep OK. I got out the next morning in the earliest drop off to the airport next day.

After I came back to the US, I searched for hotel room rates at the same hotel (Metro International) at the same location. I found that the rate was INR 2500! In other words, the two guys at the airport got me the same rate that I would have received if I had done my own search using TripAdvisor! They took INR 500 from me because they ‘saved’ INR 1500 for me. Nice little scam, eh? I have no way of knowing if the ‘Sandeep(?)’ that the kept calling was a hotel employee, some other scammer or an imaginary person.

Lessons learned:
1. Avoid traveling through Mumbai whenever possible
2. Avoid using any local ‘help’, do everything online or through other trusted agents. Expect to get scammed if you try to use local help

The online listing of hotels in Mumbai is very limited, which was part of my original problem. I hope some local entrepreneur would create an online service similar to Tripadvisor or hotels.com with information on lots of hotels in Mumbai.

Thanks for reading! Wish you better luck while traveling!!

I think the subject just about sums up the overall and the most OVERWHELMING feature of this place. It literally, actually and really does feel like a public toilet when you reach the "place".

And I will call it the "place" in my review because actual hotel-owners might consider it offensive to call it a "hotel".

So, my travel agent had booked this as a transit hotel on my way to Singapore. And the agent is not just a neighbourhood chap, he's running the local office of a big & leading international travel agency. This agency regularly does "full page ads" in national newspapers and is probably one of the Top-3 tour operators in India.

The agent tells me this is a nice clean place in Mumbai and everyone who's stayed there has nice things to say about this place. And then that the hotel is in such hot demand because of year-end that normally the fare is Rs. 2500 but now its gonna be Rs. 3500 during the "season". So, anyway I paid for the place which included breakfast and airport pickup and dropoff.

On the way from the airport, we bypassed all the decent looking hotels and reached a crowded broken road with hawkers et all. We thought we were gonna cross it and reach a better place...but no way, this was it, bang in the "slummy" area.

And we couldn't even see the place, the driver turned into a small gate on a shabby office building and for second I thought "Oh god, we are being kidnapped"... but it turns out the place was ON THE BACK of this shabby commercial building. People, you have to digest this, the hotel was on the back thru a small lane, there is a godown and office at the front.

And we reached the place, there was a 5' x 2' board that said "Metro International" and we got out...and then it HIT US BAD. The stench, the unrestrained stench of URINE. The floor outside the place was WET...damn, I know why it was wet, but don't want to acknowledge or remember that.

So, we held our breath, my wife looked at me as if I had betrayed her trust... I felt small and useless in the world. I'd paid Rs. 3500 for a stay in a public toilet. Damn the stench and my money was damned anyway.

Checkout was fast and the staff polite, and they didn't smell. The rickety lift up was like a cupboard, we all squeezed in and manually closed the "iron gate". No sliding doors...that's in hotels!!

The room was a guesthouse room, I've stayed in guesthouses before (when I was poorer), this place was no hotel, IT WAS A GUESTHOUSE. There were 2 dirty, old PLASTIC chairs...not even wooden chairs. The color of the chairs can only be gotten by leaving out for weathering for maybe a year (maybe its second-hand plastic chairs??)

And the Double bed was actually 2 X single beds joined. The beds were wooden, but really bottom-of-the-barrel type. Same goes for a table (with the plastic chairs).

The bathroom was..well shabby. To put it summarily... neither of us took a bath in there. We decided we are cleaner off with the dirt & grime clinging to our bodies.

We ordered food (very daring of us) wondering how clean the kitchen was like, considering the rooms and the fact that we were staying in a toilet anyway. Anyway, we took our chances...and the food was terrible and I had a sore throat immediately afterwards. We crossed our fingers and prayed that it wouldn't kill us and we don't get upset stomachs.

Our prayers worked, and that was the best part of staying there. We were not kidnapped into that dingy lane, we did not die of the bad food and we did not have loose stomachs on our Singapore vacation. So, finally some good did come out of it... we made it out alive and well. And there's a Reality Show for you.

I have no summary on this place, my experience leaves no place for summaries.

We stayed one night at this hotel on arrival in India and again on return from Kerala, we stayed three nights. The hotel staff is friendly, the hotel and rooms were clean, although on our return stay, despite having made advance reservation, we were given a small (single) windowless room full of mosquitoes, and with soiled walls. I complained and we were given a better room. But the air-conditioner did not give cool air and noise from the street was unbearable. No double glazing on the windows. strong stench of urine outside reception area. The hotel is located in a very dirty suburb, garbage dumped a few metres away. In a nearby street, chicken were cooped up in small cages with mesh wire and were being slaughtered on the street. The stench was nauseating. It is not an area to stretch and stroll, but to arrive and depart from the hotel. Will neither return nor recommend to a friend.
Mumbai as it is now called, Bombay is a bedlam, pure and simple. The city has no proper roads, no pavements, pedestrians have to risk their lives walking the street or crossing it. This time I saw no cows loitering in the middle of the road, perhaps they had tired of the humans encroaching on their turf. Masses of people bunched together everywhere, doing nothing,
just staring, incredible traffic noise and fumes filling your lungs. We decided to visit Elephanta caves, starting point Gateway of India. It took one hour to reach it, morning traffic was a murder, on arrival we saw huge crowds, eating and drinking, throwing everything on the ground, around themselves. The whole area was filthy. The motor launch agents selling tickets were shouting like touts at a football match, and they all belonged to the same company operating the motor launches. We were kept waiting for one hour untill the launch was overfull, when it seemed that every one had bought soft drinks and potato chips and sat crowding the whole area, as if expecting the start of a show, the launch lurched, heaved and started a sluggish run, overcrowded and overeweight. I was secretly afraid that the launch might overturn, and I would read in the next day's papers about the drowning of two elderly tourists from Germany on an overcrowded launch in Mumbai. But we were spared this wet fate, the Arabian sea was too murky. Once we reached the shore, there was a rickety toy train to take passengers to the entrance of the caves. Then we had to climb more than one hundred steps to reach the caves. Although there were bearers of chairs to take those who wished to be whisked away, the 35oC heat melted all efforts to take one step further. Somehow we reached the summit. Entrance tickets for Indians cost ten rupees, for foreigners two hundred and fifty rupees. In India, historical monuments, temples, places of historical or archeological interest are in total state of abandon, paintings are chipped, statues defaced and not restored, squaters sitting or sleeping, cooking fires going on and cows loitering where Mughal emperors and Indian rajas once sat in splendour. Then back to the motor launch, again a delay of more than one hour in sweltering heat, old couples and small children feeling faint, mothers shouting and every body clamouring for the launch to start. The driver was located at last and we trudged back to Gateway of India. Another hour sitting in the taxi in melting heat, moving at a snail's pace through hundred traffic jams, we reached our hotel. Incredible India.