'Hotel Rooms for Unmarried Couples' to "spend some quality time in private"

Hi Nadreg,

This may be a bit off topic but since we are planning something to do related to the Travel Partners forum, I thought to raise another point here.

I have seen there are some threads running that are targeted to find 'Hotel Rooms for Unmarried Couples' to "spend some quality time in private" (as they say).

I am not against the concept of the couples seeking some privacy, but my personal take on this is that IM could not be the right forum. Not sure what the admins/mods think regarding this?

Most of the original posters do not come back again to IM when they have (or haven't) received the necessary information. So this increases the number of posts and threads as well which are overheads to the site in my opinion.

Can we have some kind of governance to check what the content of the posts are? Or else can we do something similar to what you have proposed - an original poster of such a thread should have to cross a certain number of posts and a certain number of active days spent in IM?

Re: hotel rooms for unmarried couples, I know where you are coming from. On the other hand, most of us using IM are 'Westerners' or 'Westernized Indians', who think it is ok for unmarried couples to share hotel rooms. Many hotel owners in India do not think so, which can be a real problem for couples travelling in India. So in my view, it is a valid and important question for travellers if it is ok for them to stay in a particular hotel or not. 'Censoring' such enquiries will give additional work for moderators, and can also give the impression that IMers think there is something morally wrong with unmarried people sharing rooms.

IM works because many members take the trouble - amidst all the offtopic stuff- to actually reply to questions with first hand information. The hotel posters are usually one-off members, I think.
We may as well have a single thread somewhere- with recommended hotels for them in different cities- and be done with it once and for all

A new thread has been created.

The point is not what is perceived, but whether naming the hotels will serve any purpose? If anything, it will only make life difficult for those who are not into 'moral policing'.

Imagine the plight of some owner, who has no idea that the hotels name is being recommended, for purposes, which can fill the pockets of officials at poor guys expense.

The bottom-line is that prostitution in India is illegal, and until it is legalised, anybody spending a good time in a hotel room can be victimised. There are some excellent law enforcement officers who can differentiate and don’t bother troubling the cupid couple, but there are also those who don't want to differentiate.

So, such threads may actually end up spoiling the party for some!

My impression is that this is shifting with the change in the domestic travel demographic & overall access to the internet. The average user age & location has definitely shifted substantially in the past few years on this website.

Accordingly, the website will have to acclimatize for these changes & take proper decisions that continue to make the site interesting, informative, practical, as non redundant as possible & most importantly,,,,,, safe!

The last thing you would want is that it becomes the 'go to or referral website' for the one-night-stand tourism sector, gigolos, or those seeking fleeting/forbidden affairs. These requests/trolls/phishings seemed extremely rare when I joined this site 6 years ago & now they 'appear' much more conspicuous. Monkey see, monkey post, more monkeys see, more monkeys post ,,,,,,

Of course, at the end of the year & from a business stand point - it is less about the efficiency of the content & more about appeasing those who pay the bills & click the adverts/banners.

That's often a fine line & can make or break a website in this increasingly competitive Cyber World ......

Wouldn't facebook be a better place for these youngsters?
They never seem to come back with a report of how it went.

Maybe that could be a section in the photo-logue forum?

Just checked in to see how things are a-going - as much as I did love India, I am now planning the great African Experience, and thus do not linger...

However, I was mildly shocked by these last posts...
Being divorced, currently single but not believing I will stay single forever I find the possibility of going back to India with someone that I am not married to an absolute possibility.

I was not aware of those strict morals, and would probably not even have thought of that particular possible problem if I had not read this thread.

So YES of course there should be room for that kind of thread, even more so as one would not want to resort to some sordid REALLY-SLACK-MORALITY place if you get my meaning.



Keep up the good work and the generosity, folks! one should probably just ignore the freeriders don't you think?

Nothing to be 'shocked' about. The conundrum is how best to discern/screen legitimate international travel/cultural concerns from the more domestically oriented 'please advise me a quickie room that approves kissing etc. with my girlfriend.' Two totally different scenarios with often very different social implications, budgets & approval ratings.

Left unchallenged, at what point does the latter ( & the associated issues that answering these questions with detailed addresses of potentially consenting hotels) become a site content issue? That's all.

Someone should float this idea to a major international hotel chain to open hotels in India that are Unmarried couples friendly.

Could be their specialty like 'We are kids friendly' or 'We are Pets friendly'

'We are unmarried couples friendly'

Just wondering? and it's probably all about storage, but how exactly do some threads that are not popularly responded to add overheads to the site, how does it work? OR should members care about that? Surely expunging a few sparsely answered threads about where to cuddle are vastly more than compensated for in data amount, by all the tangents that are gone off on...

What's the thing, is it Money and overheads? Volume of data? Threads that have nothing at all to do with India, i.e. 'What I need is Money?' which could easily be whacked if housekeeping is necessary.

This thread is nothing but the Moral Police posing as very concerned and interested parties in the welfare of the site trying to marginalize the few who are not married and maybe interested in getting a hotel room in India.

Why marginalize? Oh because they don't live their life like what you think they should. Of course it is also a venue to paint them with red horns and a tail and say things like 'Oh if unmarried people ask about hotel rooms in IM today, what is next? It could be about someone asking how to get prostitutes. Or where to score skunk. So on and so forth'. Basically a bunch of bogeyman to suit your whim.

If getting a hotel room for unmarried couples is a genuine problem in India, then this topic is just about relevant as any other topics on the site. Not every visitor to India is carrying their passport and their marriage license just to get a hotel room in India. And not every couple who come into India are married.

It would be shortsighted and narrow minded to marginalize people because they don't live the way you do. And then to top it, you come up with a bunch of imaginary bogeymen to support your wild imagination and wafer thin argument.

If site content and storage space are the criteria, then this thread would easily top the list for the most useless thread and a complete waste of hard drive space.

Hummm... Arrested? in Jail? there's no internet in jails from what Ive heard

In Japan its hotels marked with an upside down octopus (so I hear). They are for married couples as well, just not married to each other. I don't criticize it just wonder where the line between public & private is drawn sometimes on the internet..

Lets call it the pubic line.