Alila SCBD Jakarta

We stayed for 1 night just want to experience. Room was clean, room service food was excellent, the 4/5 is scored for Housekeeping team on the floor, very polite and helpful. The only one thing we were not pleased about was the fire test. My partner and I work in the hospitality industry which we fully understand how fire test works in every hotel. However, this hotel did not organize or train the staff well to handle the test. Upon arrival, there was no information provided about the fire test. No letter in the Reception nor in the Room. The fire test starts at 11am on the check-out date, it was beeping not consistently and very short at first. I noticed that was probably fire test, me and my partner casually talked about that for couple of minutes. Until gradually it has partial announcement (it was on and off, a phrase was announced and being cut off half way that kind of thing), even though we understood that might be a fire test by experience. I decided to call down and confirm - the staff said, "this is a test for your room and will last few minutes". The statement was not nice as if I'm not experienced enough, I might think that the fire alarm might have issue in my room particularly. 10 minutes later, the announcement and siren starts heavily, while my partner finished his shower and started his phone call with business partner. He tried to last for 5 minutes and eventually he has to finish the call and call down again to Reception. All the above has gotten us confuse for 25 minutes at least. I told my partner that we should get going. We went out of the room, as previously we decided to go swimming and asked for late checkout since early morning - we wanted to take the lift which it was out of service due to the fire test. There was no one on the floor at all (usually there will be staff on every floor to check the fire door but it was not the case). We walked down to the staircase from level 8. Until level 3, we saw that there were signs for evacuation route (not clear). Also we saw that there was a big Cordless Drill/Driver left in the middle of the staircase. That looks so scary. My partner is already furious, he needed to jump pass that thing and see which path we should go next. As much as I'm usually more understanding and calm than my partner, I started to feel this is very upsetting. Luckily we are not with our little one. This is health and safety on your staircase in the middle of the evacuation route! There were few doors left open to some kind of construction side on level 3 and 2 that was easily accessible by anyone. Until we managed to walk to the lobby, all the staff looks very chill. No one even standing close to the staircase to explain (when the lift is out of service and you would expect there are guests coming down from staircase). We managed to speak to the Front Office Manager and was told that it was a last minute fire test that organized less than 24 hours. We work in the same industry and clearly know which department should be responsible for what task. 24 hours is very adequate to get last minute things prepared, if not, communication problems should be looked into - with all due respect, but that speaks a lot of the leadership of the Head of Operations. How could you have a 25 minutes fire test happen, before the guest check-out time (starts from 11am), with multiple unsuccessful attempt to get the siren and announcement clearly done, engineering equipment blocking the way which luckily that was turned off. The only one thing that I was glad was that we were not experiencing a real fire situation. As otherwise, experienced like us, I will have no clue if we can escape on time. All in all, we have passed the feedback to the FOM and hopefully this will be looked into and discuss further for the future process how to carry out a proper fire test. Other than this, everything else was excellent. We would still consider to come back again but might just request for low floor as in case.

Best location

super good and clean hotel. especially the breakfast which is fantastic. hotel services are good as well. rooms are big and comes with a big toilet. highly recommended