Hotel Yoga Badrinath Dham

"It was shockingly bad.  First, we came with a group of 16. Had emailed several times in advance to make sure the rooms and room assignments were clear and each time we’re told everything is ready. We arrived early evening after a long drive from Kedarnath and…the rooms weren’t ready.  The triple rooms we had reserved were given away to others and we spent the next hour trying to sort everything out with people who were completely incompetent and had no idea what they were doing.  But this wasn’t the bad part.  When we got into the rooms we immediately began calling to find another place to stay. The rooms weee freezing because, get this, they don’t have heating!!!! Badrinath is cold!  It’s in a deep valley at 10,800 elevation. This was October and the temperatures were just above freezing at night. They kept insisting that it was ok because the beds were heated. 30% of the beds were not heated and those that did work went between scalding hot to cold.  Mind you, this does nothing to heat up the room.  When we asked if they had space heaters, they said no.  They eventually were able to scare up a few, but most of our group had a cold night and ended up catching colds.  The rooms themselves are nothing like the photos.  The walls are t white. They are stained with mold. Places on the walls near the door and windows have paint bubbling up because clearly they tried to paint over the mold.  The rooms smell awful. I end onto every room and the rank, musty, moldy smell was so strong it gave most a headache.  See, without a heating source to dry the air, the rooms are moist alll the time.  Also, whenever you take the key out of the master switch when you leave, all power is cut. So the condensation on the windows from your breath and the moisture of the cold keeps everything damp, so the walls, the bedding, the curtains, towels, everything is modes or smells of mold. The windows do not open, so other than leaving the door open when they clean, no fresh air.   The dining hall was small, dark, and unclean.  The finner buffet consisted of 5 things and they all looked disgusting. I lived in India for 15 years and have never seen a hotel this bad—and believe me most of that time would be in very simple, Indian hotels. But the combination of discomfort, uncleanliness, and terrible staff was hands down the worst I’ve seen.  We had to stay the night there because most were too tired to shift hotels and everyone just got into bed with their clothes on because the beds are so unsightly. I didn’t even look in or use the bathroom.  Just got up, put on my shoes, grabbed my luggage and walked out, my breath visible in the freezing room.  The hotel manager never showed up to talk with me either the night before or the next morning even though he was on the phone with the duty manager.  And finally, they wouldn’t refund our stay. We wrote and called trip.com who called the hotel and they wouldn’t refund our money, nearly US $5000. Trip.com also would not cover the refund even though we booked through them and wrote them that the photos and descriptions of amenities were completely misleading. Finally we challenged the payment through Amex (cannot recommend amex strongly enough!) and only once they realized they weren’t going to receive any money did they agree to refunding everything except the one night we spent there.  Not sure I’ll ever use Trip.com again after this either.  Consider yourself warned."