Wait's over, feast your eyes on floatel

KOLKATA: A wait of four years will end in a journey of four miles on Monday.
The country''s one and only floating hotel — Gold Float — being constructed behind public eyes at the Kidderpore docks will finally be towed to its business location on the Hooghly, off Strand Road on Monday afternoon.
And with it, Kolkata will step into the exclusive club of cities like Vienna, Moscow, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Shanghai that have floating hotels and hospitals.
Manor Floatel Limited (MFL), the company executing the project, has termed the maiden voyage from the Kidderpore docks to the 2 Strand Road jetty as the floatel''s "Home and Dry Run" — a term usually associated with ships. "The term, which owes its origin to the famous Oxford-Cambridge boat races, is very common in the shipping business.
It has been used for ages for any ship''s first voyage, from where it is constructed to the port or country it is registered with.
Here in Kolkata, though the floating hotel is built on a barge, we have tried to give it every possible look of the deck of a ship. Hence we plan to celebrate its arrival to its designated location in style," said Manab Pal, one of the directors of MFL.
It will be tugged from the lock mouth of Kidderpore Docks around 2 pm on Monday and will pass under Vidyasagar Setu to anchor at the shore jetty opposite Samriddhi Bhavan, the SBI headquarters on Strand Road.
This short journey had been stalled for months following an impasse over the classification of the floatel — whether the port authorities could charge docking fees on the floating hotel at the rates fixed for vessels, like self-powered ships and barges. Gold Float, a unique four-storey concept hotel, has stunning looks and better technological back-up too.
"Hooghly is one of the few rivers where you get a boat tide, which at times can be very threatening to any object floating on the water.
Since we have a full-fledged lift operating on board, we have introduced the latest safety technology to ensure that Gold Float does not experience any kind of sudden movement during strong tides or storms," said Ujjwal Roy Mukherjee, senior officer of MFL.
The 73-room floatel has four grand suites, two exclusive restaurants on the top floor and a huge 24-hour coffee shop. A conference room has been created on the third floor and named — rather unusually— the Captain''s Room. It will be rented out for private parties as well, Mukherjee said. On the ground floor of the floatel, a full-fledged business centre will cater to executive guests.
No surprise here on who the target market is.