Bombay Hotels: The Ongoing Saga

OK, remember that time I posted about how I totally booked a hotel in Bombay, and even though it seemed vaguely sketchy, all was well and I would have a (hopefully) lovely or at least vermin-free place to rest my head for my first two nights in India?

Well, apparently not so much. Even though I got a preliminary confirmation from the sketchville website I booked through, they didn't charge my credit card, and I never got the follow up "yes we talked to the hotel peeps and they totally have room for you!" confirmation. This is OK, because like half an hour after "booking" the hotel in question, which shall remain nameless, I found like 10 really bad reviews of it online. And not of the "room was really small, and they didn't even have room service!" variety. Like "It smelled like an outhouse, and roaches fled when I turned on the light!" That bad. So all is probably for the best.

But it still left me without a place to stay in Bombay, even one that smelled like a bathroom and had roaches.

So then I hit up Lonely Planet's website. They have their own hostel/hotel booking section, which is great because A) they feature a lot of the places from their guidebooks, and B) they are far less sketchy than some random Indian hotel booking website I found by googling "Bombay Budget Hotels". Their site is very straightforward, and best of all they only charge a 10% reservation fee, which means I don't have to worry about showing up in the middle of the night to find that they'd taken my money and given my room to somebody else.

I ended up picking a place called the Railway Hotel. The name is apt, as it's apparently right up the block from Victoria Terminus. From what I can tell, the general opinion on Railway Hotel is pretty good, or at least I have found only positive feedback (good listing in the Lonely Planet, a couple of people on a message board recommending it to some harried traveler who had a 6 AM train to catch). The photos on the website look pretty good and quite clearly feature windows (always a good sign). As for what it smells like and the wildlife content, I guess I'll just have to find out.