Hotel Annamalai International - Hotel in Puducherry - Pondicherry, India

My sister's engagement happened in one of their party halls. Though ambience was good, the food was so very ok ok. This is supposed to be a star hotel, and the food they served can be found in any average hotels here. Nothing special.

We shared lunch with friends. Sea food apriciate more. good atmosphere. No noise. Neat & clean. It's little out of town. We want to share again food with friends.

It was a very pleasant stay. The moment I stepped inside the door of the hotel to check out it was a pleasure. The staff are very friendly and professional. The rooms were excellent and well maintained. The staff of the restaurant were exceptional and ensuring that the quality of service is not compromised. Thanks to all the staff. Debasis Mukherjee &family

This hotel is a great and affordable stay in Pondicherry. The food was good but the service was a bit slow. The bathrooms were hygienic and the bed was comfortable.The ashram is about a 10 minute drive away. The amenities too were better than what we expected. A beautiful garden is there too. A solid 9.5/10. Recommended to stay in this hotel!

Aug-2023: Stayed with friends for vacation. The room was excellent and the room service was fantastic. The ambiance was very nice. The staff were very cordial and accommodating. The food was excellent. Loved using the gym and swimming pool. Very near to main city and on the main road.

I can only say that our stay at Hotel Annamalai was pretty disappointing. Don't get me wrong. The staff at the hotel are courteous and do their best to help. However, there are a couple of issues preventing them from being useful to guests. Firstly, there is a significant language gap with many employees speaking not a word of English. Hence, the guest is left to converse in whatever broken Tamil they can manage. The Hotel makes absolutely no attempt to bridge the language gap when it comes to the lower level employees. Secondly, the processes themselves seem to have been designed to save the Hotel money, rather than be helpful to the guests. For example, every time the guest switches off their TV, their access to cable channels is cut off. Next time you turn the TV on, you will need to call the maintenance technician to come and get your access to the cable channel restored. This policy, on its own, served to be the most irritating and annoying one for us. During our two day stay, we had to call this technician at least 5 times! Add to that, the hotel had taken up quite a bit of construction when we were there, and the dust from this construction was pretty much everywhere, including inside our room. The service in their restaurant was also painfully slow. And the food seemed to arrive in absolutely random order with some starters arriving after some dishes from the main course. So much so that after our initial lunch there, we vowed never to eat there again -- not because of the quality of the food, which was OK, but because of the snail-paced service. The room service also got a couple of orders wrong and delivered them incomplete. We then had to call again to get the complete order. We paid more than Rs7,500 per day for the room. For that price, we got ridiculously slow and inaccurate service, an unreliable TV, and a dusty, dank room. The quality of their service could be forgiven to some extent if they were charging less than half of what they do, but at their current prices I wouldn't recommend this hotel.

There are pros n cons of this hotel: read my review for a detailed understanding: Location: not great, the surrounding of this hotel is extremely low class. It's 2.5 km from the beach, so they shouldn't charge so much because it's far from the beach. Check in: not good, this is the first time where we had to pay the entire amount in advance before even checking in. Usually we book rooms with some advance token amount and pay the due while checking out. This hotel takes the entire amount before check-in and does not even provide a bill. They said they will give the bill after check-out. Then why do they make us pay the entire amount before check-in? Unreasonable people. Housekeeping: bad: the hotel staff come for housekeeping and enters the rooms without permission. In every hotel, usually we place a tag at the door or ask the reception for housekeeping, but everyday when we returned at night to our room, we would find that housekeeping is already done for our room. This is not right because many times, we leave valuables and confidential documents in our rooms and many people will not be okay with housekeeping service without permission. Worse, everyday after housekeeping, they would take away the towel and forget to replace with new towels. We had to call the reception everyday to give us new towels. Food: horrible- the complimentary breakfast here is a joke. Every single day it's the exact same menu and the food items are all vegetarian. Just for the sake of a non veg menu, they keep chicken curry as an option. In which part of the world do people have chicken curry for breakfast? It does not even fit with any food item early morning. That is the one non veg menu they have and I'm sure they keep it from previous day because hardly anyone eats it, so they don't even provide it fresh. Restaurant: good- the food tastes good. Only thing, they could increase the quantity of the food items. Rooms: good- rooms are good. No complaint about them. Very clean and everything is in working condition. Reception: bad- very adamant people. They forced us to pay everything in advance. Also the staff is not knowledgeable about basic things. We asked for HDMI or VGA cable to connect the TV to laptop, we also asked if it's a smart tv or not, they replied it's a digital TV. How poorly knowledgeable can someone be in this generation to answer that? Obviously every TV is digital. Wifi: bad- they are extreme misers when it comes to wifi. They give different credentials for different devices which gets logged out most times. Every time we had to login seeing the different credentials for different devices. Why can't there be 1 single credential for guests to connect? Internet speed is also very slow. Room service: great- the room service boys are the only decent polite boys in the entire hotel.

This is one of the finest hotels in Pondicherry located in prime locality with all amenities. It has a restaurant, conf halls, swimming pool and excellent room service. Spacious room with elegant layout for keeping our belongings. Well maintained wash rooms. One can thoroughly enjoy their stay in this beautiful place