Our Getaway to Batam

Dan and I booked ourselves a weekend getaway to Batam soon after he was done with his first semester. We were looking forward to our stay at Harris Resort, the one where Dan and I stayed when he came to Singapore last July. Not only were the service and spa facilities awesome - karaoke was the very next activity we were keen on doing over the weekend.

Not too sure if I am a difficult customer or if it's simply because I have been spoilt by "Japanese Customer Service"; I must admit that Customer Service standards in Singapore have deteriorated to unacceptable levels of which I am very much ashamed. When I requested the lady over the counter to amend my Immigration Card (my D.O.B was incorrect), she frowned and told me in an impolite and unprofessional manner, "It's OK [one lah]" (this is Singlish), shooed me away and attended to the next customer. Dan said I should have demanded that the very same lady amend my details so that she would learn to fix her mistakes. But knowing me, it was best I approached someone else to avoid ruining the entire holiday.

Anyway, we soon reached Batam after 1.5 hours' boat ride. We enjoyed our lunch and were very excited about the 3 hour spa that would help us de-stress. After the spa, we had a game of bowling, courtesy of the resort. We must say that we are sticking to Wii Sports for bowling.

Throughout the day we were very excited about Karaoke. However, soon after dinner we found out that they no longer had Karaoke at the usual place. A new Karaoke bar had taken over and was charging us $20 per hour (the usual price was $5 plus a free drink for the entire night)!!! We were very unhappy with the fact that different staff charged us different prices ($6 per 10 songs, etc.) and so on. The manager was called in, as I could not be bothered explaining the situation to every single member of staff I had to speak to, and Dan managed to negotiate free karaoke for 1.5 hours with a free drink. Just as we thought the unpleasant experience was over, we experienced power failure (while asleep) 4 times throughout the night and two false fire alarms!!!

The next morning, we were selected to provide our feedback and guess what, we were aboslutely frank with our comments!!! Our friends and family in Singapore felt that what we did would lead us to nowhere and so on...

WE GOT A FREE NIGHT'S STAY THE NEXT TIME WE VISIT!!!