Picking the best hotel room – when cheap delivers more than upscale and expensive

by Scott Carmichael on

We are already halfway through our hotel month here on Gadling. In the past week weeks, we’ve written hotel reviews, shown some wacky minibar finds, and described the best way to pick a hotel brand.

Today’s article is going to try and explain some of the logic that goes into picking the best hotel room, and getting the best value for your money. The examples in this article will be based on real hotels, real rates and real stays.

If you are not interested in amenities, and just want to get the cheapest possible room, then this article really isn’t going to help you much. Instead, the target audience for this article is the hotel guest who doesn’t mind paying some extra for their room. After all, paying more gets better service and amenities, right? Wrong!Here is a real world example of the tale of two rooms – you need a room in Chicago, so you start your search. Your requirements are simple; you want a spacious room with a view, a king bed and free Internet access.

Lets pick 2 of the more popular hotels in downtown Chicago (within 5 minutes of each other):

One of these rooms is a 2 room suite on a high floor (with a view of the Hancock building), a kitchen, free breakfast, flat panel HDTV’s in both rooms, recently renovated and access to free wired and wireless Internet.

The other is a smaller room with outdated furnishings, and comes without a “view”. The room does come with butler service and a DVD player. As an added bonus, the hotel does offer wireless Internet, but the signal is too weak to pick up in your room.

Of course, the larger room is the cheapest here. The concession of picking the cheaper hotel is that you don’t get that “luxury hotel” feeling when you step into the lobby. That said, the service in the cheaper hotel did feel much more relaxed and the free breakfast was a great deal.

Of course, I’m not trying to tell you that you should never stay in an expensive hotel – sometimes the occasion calls for some added luxury, but on a “normal” stay, upscale hotels can’t always provide the best value for money. The more expensive hotel often offers better amenities (spa services, valet parking etc…). However, when you are saving $147 a night, you’ll actually have money left to pay for those spa services.

So, next time you head to the hotel booking site, try and think smarter. This will require some homework, as not all cheaper hotels are going to be a good deal. Many of those hotels may not have been renovated in years.

Hotel review sites can be a great tool for this. Try to stay away from the room photos provided by the hotel and do searches for user submitted reviews photos through sites like Tripadvisor or Hotels.com. These photos often paint a much more honest picture of the hotel. When reading reviews, skip the ones with rants and complaints with hyperbole as too many people post totally useless reviews. A good article on how to use Tripadvisor can be found here.

If you do your homework, and read through all the real reviews and photos, you may be able to find that one gem that is able to save you $150 a night. Sure, you may not be in the luxurious location you had expected, but you’ll be able to sleep better at night knowing you’ve got more money to spend on worthless souvenirs.

Russians convert nuclear icebreaker into a hotel

by Annie Scott on

“Lenin” is the name of this ship, which was launched in 1957. It was the first nuclear powered surface ship and the first nuclear powered civilian vessel in the world.

So what kind of ship is it? An icebreaker. Icebreakers can literally cut through permanent and seasonal ice in the water — they are specially shaped for this and are actually rather clumsy in open water.

This 134-meter long, 19 ton ship was decommissioned in 1989, and on May 5th, it sailed into Murmansk, where it is now being converted into a luxury hotel and museum.

It makes sense — the ship was quite like a hotel, complete with cabins, a library, a cinema, a club, and several dining rooms.

Vyacheslav Ruksha, head of nuclear icebreaker operator Atomflot, told Ekho Moscow that there is no radiation risk. All aboard!

[via The Rich Times]

Weird and wacky finds from the hotel minibar

by Scott Carmichael on

I’m of the opinion that there are two kinds of hotel guest – one that is so scared of the hotel minibar that they’ll refuse to be handed the key, and one that makes it one of the first things they check out in their room.

I’m one of the latter – and find that the contents of the minibar says a lot about the quality of the hotel chain. A low end hotel chain may offer nothing more than a couple of bottles of water and some full size cans of soda. High end hotels may have as much as $2000 of items behind the door (their prices, not retail prices).

I’ve collected some of the weirdest things I’ve come across in the hotel minibar. And before you ask – yes, I too hate the automated minibar where a mere touch of the door makes a computer think you robbed the place.
W Hotel, Times Square New York

Many hotels know that their guests might/will get a bit frisky when they enter the room, and most of them understand that their guests don’t always carry “protection”. For that reason, the minibar may be where you’ll often find an assortment of intimacy products. The W Hotel at Times Square takes adult fun a little further with their “sex in the sheets” product. Sure, it isn’t really a minibar item, but it certainly is worth mentioning in this lineup.

For $18, someone will come up to your room with ice cream, a bunch of toppings and plastic sheets. I’ll leave it up to you to decide what these are for. Add $20 and you get a disposable camera. Kinky!

Edgewater Hotel, Seattle

The Edgewater is one of my personal favorites in Seattle. The whole place just feels more like home than most hotels, down to the contents of their minibar. Sure, they have the regular overpriced booze and soda, but they are also the only hotel I know of that will gladly sell you a teddy bear or rubber duck. Sure, some people may claim they want it for their kid back home, but I’m sure there are guests that gladly spend the $40 to have a companion to keep them company in their bed.

Hotel Rivington, New York

The hotel on Rivington is one of those hotels that tells a lot about itself just by looking at the minibar. This thing has it all – from full size bottles of Champagne to six (yes, six) different “intimacy products”. They also have T-Shirts, full bottles of Patron and $6 gummi bears. You can instantly tell this is an expensive minibar, because they don’t stock any regular soda, but they do have 8 different flavors of juice.

With the amazing view from their rooms, and the Tempur-Pedic bed, it is no surprise that they keep these items in the minibar, it is a very romantic hotel.

$18 rooms at The Copley Square Hotel!

by Annie Scott on

The Copley Square Hotel, Boston will be celebrating it’s 118th birthday tomorrow. What does this mean for you? Uber-cheap rates!

Starting at 1:18 pm ET and lasting 118 minutes, the Boston luxury hotel will offer rooms at $18 per night — up to 5 rooms per night (from July 14 until September 24, 2009) will be available for $18, and at least five more will be available for $118.

These rooms are going to be first come first serve, so be sure to visit their website right away at 1:18. The deal can only be booked through the website.

The Copley Square Hotel is Boston’s second oldest hotel, and just underwent at $18 million renovation. The property is environmentally friendly, WiFi equipped (complimentary), and has MP3 players, a fitness center and three venues for food and cocktails. Babe Ruth, President McKinley, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald have all stayed at The Copley Square Hotel.

Rates at this classy hotel normally average $265 – $590, so this is quite a bargain and a great excuse to visit Boston! Visit Copley Square Hotel Birthday Celebration for more information.

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A Super Dining Option at Westin Hotels and Resorts

by Kendra Bailey Morris on

Many of us travelers have had more than our fare share of average hotel dining experiences, especially when it comes to breakfast. I mean, let’s face it. How inspiring can a continental breakfast buffet of day-old scones and room temperature yogurts really be?

Toss in the fact that eating healthy on the road is its own particular challenge, and folks looking for a decent meal are often left to nosh on their own private stash of granola bars along with lukewarm in-room, coffee-maker-coffee, which while arguably better for you than a platter of greasy sausage links, isn’t particularly satisfying.

Lucky for us, Westin Hotels and Resorts has just unveiled a new breakfast and all-day dining menu that features nature’s very own Superfoods, which are best described as foodstuffs which make you feel…well…super.

Based on the nutritional concepts of the bestselling books published by Superfood Partners LLC, the concept is fundamentally simple. Superfoods are ingredients that are well-known for their health-enhancing benefits. Foods such as tomatoes, avocados, blueberries, salmon and nuts contain that ever-familiar, catch-word “antioxidant”. Antioxidants help to slow down the absorption of those evil, damage-causing free radicals that are often responsible for contributing to heart disease, diabetes, macular degeneration, even cancer.
Yet, the best part is that these Superfoods actually taste good, especially when found in carefully plotted combinations such as poached organic eggs and smoked salmon “Benedict”, blueberry-orange granola pancakes, and grilled turkey hash with sweet potatoes and tomato/arugula salad.

And, these goodies aren’t just for breakfast. Westin’s all-day dining menu is a combination of restorative dishes featuring well-known Superfoods including sesame soy-glazed tuna salad with edamame and broiled green tea-lacquered salmon with lemon shiitake essence. Like Westin’s breakfast offerings, each of these Superfood items is clearly defined on the menu by its signature SuperFoodsRx greenleaf logo, making it easy to spot.

It can be argued that Westin isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel here, but they are certainly tapping into a viable need- one that travelers, especially those who are frequently on the road for business, are beginning to seek out more and more. With both health and social awareness clearly on the rise when it comes to personal dining choices (check out the film Food, Inc. to see what I mean) there’s no doubt that Westin’s Superfoods program can fill a highly-publicized gap that will not only leave diners feeling super, but perhaps even a little healthier.

–Kendra