The Business Traveller's Checklist: What to Look for in a Lucknow Hotel

Twelve things worth checking before booking a working trip to Lucknow, from the drive time you are actually quoted to whether the meeting room has a wall you can project onto. Written for people who travel to work, not to sightsee.

A working trip is judged by different things than a holiday. Nobody remembers the view from a business hotel. They remember whether the car was there at six in the morning, whether the room was quiet enough to take a call at eleven at night, and whether the meeting room had somewhere to plug in. This is the list worth running before booking anything in Lucknow.

Start with the drive times, and ask for the honest ones

Location is the one thing about a hotel that cannot be improved later, and for a working trip it is measured in minutes rather than kilometres. The number worth asking for is not the best case. It is the drive at the hour you will actually make it, which for a business trip is usually early morning to the airport or early evening back from meetings.

The airport figure is the one that compounds. A trip with a flight at each end pays that drive twice, and the difference between twelve minutes and half an hour is most of a working morning across a three-day visit. The full arithmetic is set out in 12 minutes from the airport.

The room, judged as an office

A business traveller uses a room differently from a holiday guest. It is a place to work for two or three hours, take calls at odd times, and sleep badly before an early flight. Three things decide whether it does that well.

• Quiet. Ask which side of the property faces the banquet spaces, and request the other one if your trip coincides with an event or the wedding season.
• A working surface. A real desk and a chair at the right height, not a dressing table with a stool.
• Power where you sit. The most common failure in otherwise good rooms is sockets that are all behind the bed.

If you are bringing a meeting with you

Hotels quote meeting rooms by seat count, which is the least useful number available. Work in area per person instead. A classroom or training layout needs 30 to 35 sq ft per person, roughly twice what theatre-style seating takes, and a session that runs all day needs more rather than less. The Sapphire Banquet at 9,000 sq ft handles substantial sessions, and smaller groups fit the private dining spaces.

• Ask for area, not seats, and do the division yourself.
• Check the projection surface and where the light falls on it at the hour you are presenting.
• Confirm who provides AV and who fixes it at nine in the morning when it fails.
• Ask where tea and lunch are served, and whether that means moving the whole group.
• For a full-day session, ask about the room at four in the afternoon, which is when air handling and comfort start to show.

Conference and event specifics are covered in hosting corporate events in Lucknow.

The things people forget until they need them

• Food at the hours a working day produces. An early departure and a late return are both outside conventional service windows, so ask what is available at six in the morning and eleven at night.
• Laundry turnaround, in hours rather than in principle, if the trip runs longer than two days.
• Somewhere to hold a conversation that is not your room or the lobby. A bar or a private dining room does this better than a coffee shop.
• Billing that a finance department will accept without a follow-up email.

For an evening that runs past a working dinner, Amrkh handles the meal and Saakiya the hours after it, both on the property. Reservations and corporate bookings go through reception on +91 92199 04134.