This weekend we planned an outing with office friends and after various discussions, we zeroed down at Agra. Personally I couldn't relate it as I never think of visiting these hot places in summers. But certainly there are various aspects associated with office trips and place where you stay plays an important role. We decided to stay in ITC Mughal, Agra. This post shares about the experience of staying in ITC Mughal, services offered, food variety & quality and other related stuff.
All of landed in Agra after awesome Volvo journey on Agra Expressway which connects to Delhi. On our way we played various games like dumb charades and Mafia. Folks in the team are pro in both these games. As we landed, we headed towards the reception for checking in. Refreshing welcome drink was served to the first lot who reached the reception and then they lost track. To avoid confusion, they didn't offer the drink to other folks and of-course nobody bothered to ask for it. As a travel blogger, I need to observe these details and that was my first impression about ITC Mughal, Agra.
As expected it's quite a huge campus and equally impressive as other hotels we have visited in past. Somehow I keep very high expectations from ITC, so I was not very impressed. This looked like an old hotel by looking at it's architecture and styles of the rooms.
Just after entering the room, we freshened up and headed for lunch. ITC Mughal has various restaurants and our buffet was planned in one of them. Food was pretty good, although service in restaurant was very slow. Not sure if that is the regular phenomenon or they are not equipped for extra customers during long weekends. Restaurant was quite noisy at the time we visited. It seemed there was some marriage in the hotel and kids were playing around. After lunch we tried to connect Wi-fi and checked at reception. Got to know that wi-fi is paid. That was very interesting and surprising in the era of brilliant data plans all around. None of us were worried about it and we were expecting good connectivity on complimentary basis.
From ITC website, you feel lot of warmth and awesome service, but I failed to experience that. It can be because of the fact that we were in group. We spent a good amount of time in the swimming pool and the state of change-room was worse than my swimming school in one of the schools at Noida. Towels were lying all around and it was all wet. I was not carrying my phone when I went for swimming otherwise I was tempted to click few photographs there.
There are 2 swimming pools in the hotel - one is specifically for folks staying in Suites. I don't have photograph of that pool but the one you see above is accessible to everyone staying in ITC Mughal. We had great time in the pool. We felt same service level here as well. Drinks ordered came pretty late and some of the orders were completely missed, so we had to remind again. I completely failed to understand if it was overload it's a norm for service at ITC. Other thing I could think is that staff distribution is more for the other wing which can suites. From business point of view that makes sense but not serving appropriately is not good for such hotels and brands.
We took a around of the whole property and there is enough green space around this space. As per ITC website, this property is on 35 acres of land. Other good part is that it's close to Taj Mahal. Some of the folks from our group walked-down to the Taj Mahal in morning.
There is a section with various indoor games and stuff for outdoor games. Inside the sports room, you can find Chess, Carom, Table-tennis, pool table, billiard table etc. You can also grab badminton or cricket kit to place in one of the lush green ground in ITC Mughal. We dared to play cricket in scorching heat and it was fun :). I loved this part of the hotel, which is very green and lively. I could notice lot of birds here in morning but couldn't click as I was not carrying any zoom lens with me.
Interiors of some of the it's restaurants is awesome, although some of them were quite empty while few of them were always crowded. I was just checking out and there are some interesting deals available for ITC Mughal. Be aware of all the details before making the decision but I see value for money if you want to visit Agra for 3 nights.
I felt in love with these lights used in the reception. It stood out brilliantly in the beautiful reception of ITC Mughal at Agra.
Overall it was a lovely stay at ITC Mughal and I wish to explore their other properties soon.
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