Blizza Blizza

To kick off the new Travel category, here are some observations on hotels that I’ve accumulated over the past two months.

Offering free wireless Internet access seems to be the norm. This is a Good Thing™. What’s not such a good thing is Wyndham’s policy on Internet access. They have both wireless and wired Internet in all the rooms, but they charge $9.95 per day for it. You can join the Wyndham ByRequest program at no charge and get Internet access (along with a host of other benefits) for free, but there’s a big catch: you cannot get ByRequest benefits unless you personally make the reservation! So much for all the business travelers whose employers make the reservations for them, including airline employees. Pissing off a very large segment of your client base seems like a pretty poor business practise if you ask me. I guess anyone without an expense account basically doesn’t matter.

The nicer the hotel, the less likely it is to have any kind of halfway decent free breakfast, and the more outrageous its prices for any food purchased in the hotel. The exception to this so far was the resort in Bonaire, where the sign on the back of the room’s main door said the room went for $250/night, but the breakfast was free and amazingly good — waffles, pancakes, sausage, omelettes, six different kinds of fruit, pastries galore, five different kinds of juice, bagels, etc. Honestly, I would be more than happy to trade a couple sets of towels and your salon-exclusive toiletries for a bagel and a glass of juice, Crown Plaza Miami. If you think I’m paying $13.50 for your breakfast buffet, you’re nuts. What exacerbates this even more is when a hotel is located in an area where walking to get outside food is simply not an option, like my current residence at the Wyndham Miami Airport. The street outside is basically a four-lane highway with construction all over the place; in order to get to any reasonable food, I have to take a taxi or catch the hotel shuttle to the airport, where the restaurants are really stretching the definition of “reasonable”. (I kid you not; the bagel place in Miami International’s E concourse charges $2.99 for one bagel, and cream cheese is an extra $0.90. For the price of two bagels with cream cheese, I could buy a baker’s dozen back home.)

Anyone booking a stay for more than one night should be placed in a room with a refrigerator. Any hotel chain not offering in-room refrigerators for such people should be boycotted. Your failure to provide a refrigerator does not make us want to buy your overpriced hotel breakfast or pay $14.50 + 20% “gratuity” + sales tax + 20% service charge + $3.50 delivery charge for a room-service burger (actual charges for a hamburger from one recent hotel). It makes us want to strangle your management. Stop being cheap bastards and put a refrigerator in the room. Oddly enough, the cheaper the hotel, the more likely it seems to be that you get a refrigerator. Apparently the $200/night places aren’t making enough from the cost of the room alone, so they need to make up for it by “encouraging” their patrons to buy $20 hamburgers.

Hotel showers vary widely in quality, with the better showers not necessarily being at the better hotels. For the love of God, I do not need a showerhead that pulses like crazy and cannot be set to a steady stream. That drives me crazy. I also don’t need a shower that only allows three minutes of hot water (*cough* $250/night resort in Bonaire *cough*) before it goes cold, even when you’re the only person awake in the entire building at oh-dark-thirty in the morning. And I understand that vinyl shower curtain liners are incredibly expensive ($1.99 at your local Target), but would it really kill hotels to use one? I prefer not stepping out onto a soaked floor because your fancy lace shower curtain allowed a gallon of spray to leak out of the shower during the eight minutes I was in there. The money you saved by not putting up a vinyl shower curtain easily got spent on laundering the four extra towels I used drying off the bathroom floor.

On a related note, the guy who came up with the brilliant idea of putting the shower and toilet together in one tiny room, with a sink and hair dryer in a separate tiny room, should be shot. I do not want to have to practise my contortionism just to close the door when trying to drop a deuce (seriously, I couldn’t sit down on the toilet and close the door at the same time) or get in the shower, and I especially don’t want to have to climb over the toilet just to get in or out of the shower. Any benefits derived from this arrangement seem rather dubious; if two people are comfortable enough to share a hotel room, they had darn well be comfortable enough to allow each other access to the bathroom sink while one is in the shower.

I will probably not have to buy shampoo, lotion, conditioner, soap, or body wash for the next three months. In at least two of the hotels I’ve stayed in recently, there were no fewer than six bottles of various cleansing products awaiting me in the bathroom, along with three bars of soap. In one of these, there was a sachet of toiletries for the linens on the bed as well. It’s nice, but is all of this really necessary? I’d rather have free breakfast.

Some hotels are really stingy when it comes to television, providing only what amounts to (very) basic cable. Some of them are marginally better, with semi-premium channels like Discovery, History, and National Geographic on a 42” LCD HDTV. Then there was the resort in Bonaire, where a cheesy movie that I was watching at about 2200 after returning from the fitness center suddenly turned into a full-fledged porno on broadcast television. Guess the Dutch have slightly different decency standards than we Americans do. Not that I’m complaining.

Speaking of fitness centers, there’s no excuse for a hotel charging $150-200/night lacking any sort of weights or weight machines in its “fitness center”. Not everyone wants to sit on the stationary bike, jog on the treadmill, or climb the Stairmaster for hours on end. It’s fine cardio, but it doesn’t get you the “beach bod” that seems to be required of all Caribbean or South Florida residents. And what’s the deal with hotel pools that are a maximum of four feet deep and shaped like a giant kidney? How am I supposed to swim laps in that? Oh, right, I forgot. The hotel pool is now a place to see and be seen, and not a place where people actually swim.