Conventional Hotels

We’re travelling. Usually, that’s a good thing, but we’ve observed that there are times when it could be better.

Anyone who’s read my blogs knows that we’ve stayed in a lot of different types of hotels / guest houses / cruise ships / etc. Usually, they’re pretty good. I can only think of one time where we flat-out said, “Uh-huh. This ain’t going to work.” We walked across the street and checked into another facility. Usually, though, we’re pretty flexible on those things.

There is, however, a set of circumstances where you simply can’t change regardless of how unacceptable the facility is. The hotels understand this and essentially hold you hostage.

The event, of course, is the downtown convention.

You’re usually trapped because you have no car, American cities have sucky public transportation and there’s not another hotel room available for close to 20 miles. They’ve all been taken up by the people attending the convention.

This is the situation we found ourselves in while checked into the Hyatt in downtown Phoenix.

The brochures, either online or in the conference materials, made this place sound like Shangri-la downtown. “Hip, urban furnishings,” and “excellent amenities,” are phrases that stood out.

Let me say first that the staff have been extremely friendly and helpful. They are, after all, simply imposing the policies that administration has set down for them. The policies, however, reflect a Gestapo-like mentality that one usually only sees in airports.

After all, you are trapped. You have no choices. You will purchase from us, or do without.

Hence, a bottle of water in your room (which has no refrigerator, microwave, mini bar or anything else) is $5.95 a liter.

That’s in US dollars.

That’s about $22.49 a gallon, for those trying to make the conversion. This is unfortunate, because you’re going to need a lot of water, even in the “cool” season in Phoenix, which we’re supposed to be in here in mid-October.

That means it only got up to 97 yesterday. Now, normally, your choices are then to either lie by the pool or stay in the A/C. In this case, though, it’s tough because the A/C in the room isn’t going to make a lot of difference for your afternoon nap.

It will cool you to sub-arctic in the middle of the night, when that one thin blanket they’ve left in the room will become woefully inadequate, but at 3:00 in the afternoon – prime nap time – it’s not going to happen. Low 80’s is about the best you can hope for, especially if you’re on the west side of the building.

They offer suggestions, though, on the little placard that takes you through the bizarre temperature control that is hidden in the darkest corner of the room with no light and requires that you sequentially punch no less than 5 buttons in order to attempt to change the temperature.

Namely it says, keep the drapes closed.

This, when their advertising hype has broadcast that the Hyatt offers some of the most spectacular vistas in downtown Phoenix.

How the hell would you know what the view is like if the drapes are closed making it as dark as midnight in your room??

I guess you’re supposed to simply suck down another bottle of that $22.50 a gallon water and enjoy it. Note that this is more than the airport charges for their security-cleared bottled water. This presumably just comes off the truck at Sam’s and doesn’t require a background check.

The water, which you can choose to buy or not, is just one of the annoyances here. I don’t take points off for not caring for the décor, which they describe as “hip, modern and urban,” and which I would characterize more as “southwest garage sale”, but the building is absolutely dismal because of the lack of light. Everything is soft lit with 40 watt bulbs hidden by indirect lighting fixtures, so there are lots of shadowy nooks.

If it were an alley at dusk, you wouldn’t walk down it.

It’s kind of like living in a film noir, and you can’t help but feel somewhat depressed after having been subjected to it for a relatively short period of time. If mold grew in Arizona, it would grow in this hotel. The dankness here relates not to the dryness of the atmosphere, but rather to the induced state of mind that comes from being in the building.

Even that I can work through, though – after all, you can go outside and see what there is to see – which isn’t much in downtown Phoenix, but there’s a nifty little light rail line that lets you go either north or south all you want for $3.50 a day.

Of course, you have to guess what you’re going to find after you get on it, because the “concierge” (i.e. the head bellman) doesn’t have any maps to show you where a mall or shopping or anything is. The best I got was “get off here and wander around, you’ll probably find some stuff.”

Here’s a news flash – I don’t “wander around” when the outdoor temp is pushing 100. I get the hell wherever I’m going, suck up the air conditioning and then get the hell back to air conditioning again.

So you stay in and use the internet to do your work.

That’d be if you’re willing to pay $12.40 a day for internet, which goes on the blink roughly once an hour. It comes right back, but of course whatever you were working on is lost by then and you get to start over again.

If anyone were foolish enough to stay here for a month, that’d be $372.00.

Oh, and the kicker there – that’s not a “per room” charge for wireless. That’s PER DEVICE. You can’t change them out, so if you start on your laptop, you can’t then connect with your iPod lest you be charged again. Of course, the front desk says they contract that out and have no control over the charges. They also don’t bother to tell you that when you check in.

I’m all for making a profit, but c’mon, you don’t have to make it all on one person.

Unfortunately, the attitude seems to be that of a lot of downtown hotels that are located next to a convention center.

You’re trapped. You got to go to the conference, it’s $15.00 a day (or more) to park downtown anywhere nearby, plus with a car rental a lot of employers simply won’t pay the costs. They're used to catering to a captive market of people who have expense accounts and aren't especially concerned about the cost of something, and they are out to make the most of it. It is, in part, one of the reasons that our downtowns are dying.

Treating customers like this is a false economy. Yeah, the Hyatt has made a buttload of money on us this time around. But given that we’re in hotels roughly 20 times a year, it will come back to haunt them. I may not remember WHICH Hyatt was so sucky, but I will remember that one of them was, and I’ll be wary before we get booked in one again.

Fortunately, we’ve only got one more day.