Novotel, Hyderabad

Running the Novotel here in Hyderabad is a twenty-four-hour job that never really slows down. We are located right where the city is growing the fastest, and you can see the skyline changing almost every month from our windows. The hotel is a big operation, but we try to keep it feeling like a place where real people work. Every morning, the lobby fills up with people checking out while others are just arriving from the airport. Our staff comes from all over the city, taking buses and bikes to get here for their shifts. The kitchen is always noisy with the sound of pans clashing, and the laundry room never seems to be empty. It’s a lot of physical work to keep a building this size clean and ready for guests. We don't use a lot of fancy words to describe what we do. We just make sure the beds are made, the food is hot, and the lights are on. Sometimes things go wrong, like a pipe leaking or a computer glitching at the front desk, and we just scramble to fix it as fast as we can. The Hyderabad sun can be pretty intense, so we spend a lot of time making sure the cooling systems are working. It’s a constant cycle of cleaning, fixing, and greeting people who have travelled from all over. We are just a group of people trying to make the stay comfortable for whoever walks through the front door today.