مستخدم نزيل
16 يونيو 2025
My wife and I share our birthday. Same day. Same joy. This year, we chose to celebrate it at Six Senses Fort Barwara, lured by the promise of opulence, heritage and the legendary hospitality. What we got instead was a lesson in how legacy can be insulted and brand equity squandered. From the moment we arrived, cracks began to show. And by the end, what was supposed to be a shared milestone turned into a shared regret. Forget sophistication. Forget precision. Even basic operational sanity was absent. The kitchen team struggled with the simplest of orders. A lachcha parantha took 45 minutes to reach the table. Breakfast orders were inconsistent, service staff seemed confused and the wait time across the board was appalling. For a brand like Six Senses, which charges a premium for their "wellness meets luxury" pitch, this was embarrassing. Worse, they had hounded us with pre-arrival communication. Endless emails, WhatsApps, reminders about dietary preferences, timings, etc and none of that translated into actual preparedness or care once we arrived. It was as if we entered a different world where the right hand didn’t know what the left had promised. The staff, though polite, were grossly untrained. Amateurish in demeanor and delivery. There’s a difference between rustic charm and sheer incompetence and Fort Barwara seemed unable to grasp it. The Guest Experience Manager ("GEM") assigned to us lacked the basic courtesy or crisis management skills one would expect from a property that literally resides atop 700 years of Indian heritage. You expect regal calm. You get fumbling cluelessness. And then there was the icing - The cake that never came! Here’s the heartbreak: We had requested a simple birthday cake to be delivered at midnight. A simple gesture that meant a lot to us. It was confirmed weeks in advance. It was reconfirmed on the day before the birthday. It was, as they say, a done deal. Except it wasn’t. Midnight came and went. No cake. No call. Nothing. We reached out to the front desk. They scrambled, issued apologies, gave us the performance of regret but the cake never showed up. Not even the next morning. No one addressed it. No manager followed up. It was as if the moment didn’t matter. But it did. To us, it did. Deeply. The property may sit atop a 14th-century fort, but its soul is hollow. Six Senses Fort Barwara is a black stain on that legacy. A charade of heritage with none of the humility or heart that Indian hospitality is world-famous for. It seems most of the glowing reviews come from foreign guests who are understandably impressed by the physical setting and may not have experienced the benchmark that Indian luxury hospitality sets elsewhere. But for Indian guests used to excellence from brands that respect occasions and emotions, this place will be a crushing letdown. This is not a place to celebrate your special day. This is not a place that understands memory-making. It is a lesson in what happens when a brand over-
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