Day 314: Two Big Smiles

29 September, 2010

Two things happened today that left me all smiles.

a) The awesome service at Park Sheraton in Chennai
b) Spending some unexpected time with the hubby online.

Let's go into the details..

I was already impressed with Park Sheraton Hotel in Chennai when I landed. I had an airport pick up and was offered coke, water and wet towels in the cab. When I reached the hotel, I was escorted by a lady who was waiting for me, directly to my room where the check-in took place. I didn't even have to hang around in the lobby to check in! After this promising start, things went to a whole new level today. The handle of my luggage had broken just before I took the flight to Chennai and needed to be fixed. I was told by the hotel staff that I can just leave the luggage in the concierge and they will get it fixed for me. Accordingly, yesterday when I went to Kanchipuram, I left my luggage with the concierge. When I got back, the luggage had been repaired and was in top form. They charged me about $4 for the services (transportation to the luggage store where it was fixed as well as the cost of the fixing). But the best part was that, this morning as I was waiting for my check out, FOUR differend hotel staff members came up to me and checked with me whether my luggage was now OK and whether they could help me with anything else. I am SO bloody impressed! This, my friends, is called world class service. Fantabulous!

After another day of consumer work (this time in Chennai), we took our flight to Mumbai. I am happily down with another bout of flu, so I couldn't wait to just get some rest. However, I still had a lot of work thanks to the upcoming presentations over the next 2 days, so I was up in my hotel room working on it. That's when I caught the hubby online and then for the first time ever, we kinda got videochat to work. It was really cool! After talking for about 10 minutes, we decided that we will just keep it on as we do our work. And that was awesome! He played songs on his computer, which I could listen too and it was almost as if we were in the same room doing our respective work. The word didn't feel all that bad then... in fact, it ended up making me feel quite chirpy I must say!

So there. I started the day with a huge smile thanks to the great service by the Park Sheraton guys and I ended the day with another huge smile thanks to the virtual working session with the hubby. Awesome!

686 more to go.