Hyd hotel refuses room to ‘single lady’

A 23-year-old woman from Bengaluru was denied a prebooked accommodation at a Hyderabad hotel on Saturday as she was a “single lady traveller”.

“So, I am standing outside a hotel in Hyderabad that didn’t let me stay because they realised I was a ‘single lady’ even after confirming the online booking .... Somehow they decided I was safer on the streets than in the hotel,” wrote Nupur Saraswat, an environmental engineer and a performance poet, in a Facebook post that has received over 2,000 likes and 1,300 shares.

The hotel’s policy, a screenshot of which was shared by Saraswat, says “locals, single ladies and unmarried couples are not allowed”. Following this, Saraswat tweeted to hotel aggregator Goibibo to ask why her booking was approved. She said Goibibo’s PR team offered her a verbal apology after her post went viral.

The company explained to her that they are trying to “filter out such hotels either by not partnering with them or by alerting customer at the time of the booking”.

Throwing light on the inconvenience faced by solo women travellers, she wrote: “I am making a fuss because I am not ready to settle. I am not ready to live in fear of my safety anymore. I am not ready to have an entire system push me around until I ‘find a man to travel with’. I AM NOT READY TO BE CHAPERONED.”

Goibibo’s Twitter handle stated that they have refunded the booking amount to Saraswat, and offered her free accommodation at another hotel for the duration of the trip. They also claimed to have delisted the hotel, and were enquiring from the hotel management and police about the rationale behind such policies.

Meanwhile, the Hyderabad hotel said it only turned down Saraswat because “it was not the right place (area) for women to be staying single in a hotel”.