Hotel Blue Sapphire - National Highway

Hideous Experience!

We needed a reasonably priced place to stay because our midnight flight was overbooked. We paid a pre-paid taxi to take us to an area near the airport that had reasonable hotels. As soon as we got down the road, the taxi driver told us there were NO reasonable hotels in that area and we’d be paying more than $200 a night for the hotels in that area and we’d have to pay for TWO nights due to the fact we were checking in so late and needing to stay after the noon checkout time. He told us he knows a place a few minutes further that will charge only $50 a night and is a good area. He assured me they’d have a/c. He said we’d have to pay him an additional 150 rupees to take us there but we’d save so much more by staying there that it would be a great deal. We were tired and broke (at the end of our trip) so we decided to save the $200 by letting him take us to this different area. Then he made a phone call to the hotel and confirmed a room was available. I had wondered if he had some arrangement with this particular hotel. I found out later, he did. We drove and drove and drove, OVER AN HOUR and I had told him we didn’t want to stay this far from the airport. He kept saying we are almost there, almost there, almost there…we ended up at the Blue Sapphire Hotel in Karol Bagh, not anywhere near the airport! I was very upset by then but decided we were tired and this was a place to sleep and have a nice shower and a/c. When we got inside the Blue Sapphire, the manager only had rooms available for $70 a night and made us PREPAY for two days in US DOLLARS and didn't give us a receipt but said he'd send it up later. When we got upstairs we called downstairs to ask for the receipt but he said he’d send it up later and put it under the door. The AC was loud and didn’t work well. In the morning we noticed the hot water “geyser” had been broken for YEARS (not a new problem!) it was all charred from some accident years ago. So now we had no warm water and no water pressure as it was nothing more than a dribble. We called down to the front desk and told them the AC didn’t work, the geyser was long ago broken and the water pressure was nonexistent AND we still didn’t get our receipt. They said 'no problem" and wanted to put us in a different room. But we decided we wanted to check out and get a place that would give us what we paid for. I put the call through the front desk to another hotel, (it is the only way to dial outside, you have to have the front desk make the call for you then ring you back…) when the call came back, it was the Blue Sapphire manager acting like he was the other hotel I wanted to call. He told me that there are no rooms available in Delhi due to the festival season. (THIS was a LIE!) Then I recognized the voice of the manager at the Blue Sapphire AND I heard the same background noises coming from over the phone that I was hearing out my own window. I confronted him and told him I knew he was the front desk manager at the Blue Sapphire. He said he wasn't, so then I asked him which hotel had I dialed he said “I don’t know” and he hung the phone up. By this time we were really mad at their scheming ways and really hot and just wanted a shower and were simply miserable with the whole situation. We knew that if we checked out, we wouldn’t get our money back for the prepaid day PLUS he could tell us we hadn’t paid yet because we didn’t have a receipt to prove we DID pay! We ended up letting them give us a second room so we could at least have a shower. We purposely arranged an outside taxi service NOT associated with Blue Sapphire to take us to the airport. We didn’t want to give them one more dollar! The taxi company must have called to confirm our stay at the blue sapphire because we discovered that when the taxi guy was early and off we went, it was a Blue Sapphire driver who loaded us in THEIR car not the one we hired, so they could get the income from our ride to the airport. I wanted to be sure everyone knows their scheming ways. Please do not stay at the Blue Sapphire unless you enjoy getting the wool pulled over your eyes and the frustration of being taken advantage of! Later I learned there ARE more reasonable hotels near the airport, you don’t need to drive over an hour to pay MORE and to be deceived!!

Unique Quality: Lying, scheming owner. Stay away from the Blue Sapphire in New Delhi, India!