New Years party at resorts – how not to get misled

Wishing all of you a Happy New Year and a prosperous 2012. For the past few years a close group of friends, with families, spend some quality time together away from home for New Years. It is one evening I look forward to as I do enjoy the company of my friends – the special ones.

Usually I take care of the reservations after doing the initial screening and taking views from all families. The parameters for the selection of a place is simple – small crowd, clean, family friendly. This place near Bangalore met all our requirements. We landed up at the resort and to our horror discovered that the venue was “shifted” and “outsourced” to an adjoining “open space”. Instead of being amongst 200 people we were amongst 10,000 people!

The organizers were missing, food was horrible (non-existant for vegetarians) and some unkown brands of “liquid” were flowing. Few in our group stayed back, the rest were “rescued” from the zoo (people were puking by 9:45 pm). Those of us who stayed back fought for the refund, called the police as we felt totally cheated and finally got part of the money.

The ticket counter claimed a “deal site” had sold more tickets than they were allocated. Not sure how far that is true. Anyway, not my problem. We went back to the resort and told them in clear terms – we felt cheated by the resort. We booked with the resort with the clear understanding that the party was “inside the resort” and “near the resort”.

Few takeaways for us – insist that the host gives in writing that it will be held inside the resort (we had emails to that effect). And for the organizers – make money, it is not a crime, but don’t cheat your clients and most importantly don’t abscond from the venue and leave few employees to put off the fire.

A quiet dinner did make up for all the mess.