While I was in Chennai, I stayed at the Asiana Hotel. In general, I was quite pleased with it, but there were a few things that seemed out of place:
- Internet service was provided through an open WiFi. I had been expecting the ridiculously overpriced WiFi that seems de rigeur for up-market hotels, but I was pleasantly surprised – at least for the first few minutes. I soon discovered that they were running a proxy server on port 80 which would periodically substitute a hotel advertisement for the page you had requested. Perhaps it was intended to be an dynamic interstitial, but under Safari it simply loaded and stayed there. The side-effects were bizarre: at one point, I brought up an Apple Help page, chose “More…”, and got the Asiana ad instead of the extended help from
apple.com. The solution, apparently, was to run everything through a VPN, but that wasn’t available on my personal MacBook Air, nor on my iPhone. - On Tuesday, I was sick, and stayed at the hotel rather than going in to the office. I delayed checkout until 2pm, and then hung around in the lounge and courtyard, drinking weak tea and hoping for recovery. As with most places in the hotel, there was background music playing. Unfortunately, they were playing just one track: “After the Sunrise”, by Yanni. Over and over again. It’s 4:38 long, so it was repeating 13 times an hour. I was in the lounge for two hours. Brain damage is a distinct possibility….
- The hotel bar was OK, even though they mixed most of the cocktails too sweet, and the tonic (not Schweppes) was so strong that it killed the taste of the gin. But the entertainment was simply disconcerting: two young women in hot pants, backed up by an older guy on guitar and synths. They had a wide repertoire, from Abba to the Cranberries, but their favourite seemed to be “Hotel California”. Did they play it because the girls liked to sing it, or because the guy wanted the chance to come forward and play the epic guitar passage at the end? We’ll never know.