Bengaluru: Hotel valet parks vehicle in ‘No parking’ zone, car towed away
Bengaluru: A reputed five-star hotel in Central Bengaluru, The Ritz-Carlton, offered a free two-night weekend stay to one of its annoyed patrons whose car had been wrongly parked on a nearby road by the hotel valet parking staff. Consequently, he was booked for a ‘No-Parking’ offence by the city traffic police on Friday night. The customer wasn’t impressed. He said that he wanted the traffic offence to be deleted from the police records in addition to the hotel management bearing the fine.
“I am not interested in their (hotel management’s) offers of free weekend stays or free dinners as compensation for this incident. All I want is that the hotel management ensures me that the offence record on my brand new car (which did not have any track record of traffic offences until now) will be deleted from the police database as I personally did not commit the offence and they should also pay up the fine for their mistake,” said Salil Mahajan, a 32-year-old city based marketing professional who went along with his Chinese friend for dinner at the Chinese cuisine named ‘Lantern’, of The Ritz Carlton on Residency Road.
Mr. Mahajan along with his friend and a delegate had been to a dinner-cum-business discussion at the five-star hotel in central Bengaluru on Friday night. Salil offered the car key to the valet parking staff at the front of the hotel and assumed that his brand new Honda City that he had purchased only 45 days ago would be safe at the hotel’s parking lot. To his dismay, he discovered a traffic offence ticket tucked under the wiper of his car when the hotel staff brought back the car to him after the dinner.
When he questioned the hotel staff about the police ticket, senior managers intervened and explained to him that their parking lot was full and that was the reason, his car was parked on a nearby lane near the hotel. Though reasonable arguments ensued between both the annoyed patron and the hotel staff, it did not result in a mutually agreeable conclusion as Salil was irritated since it was the first traffic offence record on his brand new car and insisted that the hotel management pay up the fine and take it up with the police to delete the violation from the police records.
“I did not commit the offence and my car’s track record was clean until now. It was the mistake of the hotel staff to park my car in a ‘no parking’ zone,” Salil told Deccan Chronicle. “It’s a five-star luxury hotel in the heart of the city and they have no parking facility? How irresponsible can one get parking my car in a no-parking zone? What if my car was stolen from the road?” he asks.
Initially, the hotel management maintained that they had permission from the traffic police to park their guests’ cars on the road whenever their parking lot got full, but when Salil asked them to show him the permission from the traffic police, the hotel management could not oblige. “They instead apologized for the inconvenience and offered me a ‘free two-night weekend experience’ at The Ritz Carlton,” Salil said.
