Trip to Genting (Part 1)
Spent the weekend in the land which is supposedly to be truly Asia.

It was an almost all expense paid for trip (well transport, food and accomodation included but gambling chips are not though, sigh...) by Ah Geok.

Well not her literally... The former WITS team (comprises exisiting staff and alumni) won some money during the last FY for our suggestions and projects, so the branch decided to organise a short trip for everyone, instead of the usual dinners and lunches...

The whole gang met up at Golden Mile Complex (also known informerly as Little Thailand, for obvious reason) at 10.30pm on Friday night for a 7 hour coach ride to Genting. As its gonna be a long overnight ride, those who were shortsighted decided to cast image to the wind and turned up in all our geeky specs. Erm should have taken a pic of that...

Well so anyways, we had fun although the service of the resort staff left us baffled. Ok, this may sound as if I'm in the 'Oh-I-think-I'm-more-superior-than-you' group of Singaporeans that some of our neighbouring countries often complain about, but really, compared to some other resorts I went to, the service standard really sucked. Here's a recollection of the sequence of events which made our trip a little unpleasant.

Incident no. 1:
We reached Genting at around 5.30am, give or take, but we could only check in at 12pm, which was fine since this was the arrangement when we booked the package. But then, the rooms were not ready then and by the time everyone got their room, it was already 3.00pm! And mind you, the hotel that we stayed in is supposed to be a 5 Star. How can 5-star hotels allow this to happen leh?
We later realised that '5 Star' simply refers to a brand name (much like Hainan chicken rice, Punggol nasi lemak or Katong laksa) and it does not relate to the service level nor standard. Our coach is called 5-Star-something, but its the worst coach some of us had so far.
The coaches that we saw throughout the journey must have so many stars that they dun even bother naming...

Incident no. 2:
The service staff would make ideal civil servants as they seem to be following on what's written in their SOPs right down to the full stop. Any slight variations and they are stumped, confused and dunno how to handle...

Upon arrival, since we could not check into our rooms and it was much too early, we decided to have breakfast at McDonalds. It must have been the first time that the service staff encounter such a big crowd at 6am, as they could not even handle our orders properly. Food was not readily available but that's still ok. When the food was finally ready, they can't even remember who ordered what and went all over the place. We were the first customers there but were among the last to get our food =(

Then during dinner, we were at this Kenny Roger's outlet and we ordered 5 quarter chicken meals, which allowed us to have 15 side dishes in total. So we asked for everything on the side dish menu which had about 12 items, to be served seperately so that all 5 of us could share.
The waiter smiled sheepishly and said ok, then went on to ask which 3 side dish we would like for the first meal. WTF??? So ok, thinking that he probably dun quite understand English, we proceeded to point out one by one the specific 3 side dishes that we want for each of the quarter chicken meal.
And it did not come as a surprise that the bugger mixed up the orders and gave us whatever he fancied. KNN!!! How not to be tulan you tell me...

Incident no. 3:
We were at this bowling alley and as Bernice dun really wanna bowl, we wanted to pay for only 3 games but rent 4 pairs of shoes, just in case the couple wanna share a game. When we proceeded to pay, the staff adamantly insisted that one game to one pair of shoe -_-
So ok maybe it's not normal for people to rent shoes without playing but still, the way the counter staff said it just pissed us off.

General observation, the service staff dun really smile a lot. Most of the time, they looked like they are bored to death or probably they just lost their salary at the casino. There's only one housekeeping staff who smiled and wished us good morning. And that's when we were checking out.

Kauz... I really dunno wat 'truly Asia' means, not the level of service standard, I hope...

But oh well, it did not dampen our mood as we were determined to have fun. More on the happy stuff in the next post, with pictures.