Stumbling into luxury

Once again, I'm on the road. This time I'm in Washington, DC with my older daughter, who recently finished finals.

The train trip here was easy enough and we caught a cab to the hotel. The hotel. Let me tell you about the hotel. As I usually do, I went on Tripadvisor to scout. Tripadvisor is a good site, but like any other review site you need to learn to read it properly to get the information you want. If you look at one or two reviews you can get a skewed, even inaccurate impression, and if the reports are too specific you need to evaluate them carefully. I look for commonalities, consistent themes and reports. Then I check prices.

I settled this time on a hotel called the Park Hyatt. It had great reviews, was considered to be among the best hotels in the city, and for some reason was barely more expensive than most of the other nice hotels. I have no idea why this was the case. I've stayed in Hyatt, Grand Hyatt and Hyatt Place hotels, but none of them were anything like this.

First of all, it's barely marked. There's a small lighted sign at ground level at the corner, but you'd be hard pressed to see it. There's nothing on the front of the hotel itself. I had debated reserving upgraded accommodations, but I just had a sense that if I could get rooms for less than half of what they usually cost, that the hotel might be empty enough that I could get that without having to reserve and therefore pay for it.

Happily, this proved to be the case. We were both upgraded to junior suites that connected. The rooms are made up of a living area and a sleeping area separated by a partial wall. THe living area has a desk and some comfortable chairs. The sleeping area has a bed and the usual bed-related stuff. The bathroom is huge and has one of those rain showers in an open area of one end. The closet space has enough to either stay for a week or make a complete outfit change 3 or 4 times a day for a weekend. My favorite touch is that the safe has an outlet inside so you can charge your laptop while you're out.

I'm going to skip ahead in time to give you an idea of the level of service in this place. The next day I wanted some beer to have in the room so I wouldn't have to use the motion-activated-you-lift-it you've-bought-it minibar. Normally, I would ask a hotel's front desk where I could go to get beer, but I know if I did that here that they would insist on going out and getting it for me. Oh, and my daughter said she didn't like the pillows, which are much mushier than the memory foam pillows we have at home. So I called housekeeping to ask if they had that kind of pillow and they responded, "We will get them for you and once they are in the building we shall place them in your room." Now I'm not sure that means they went out and bought us pillows, but it might.

Oh yeah, and then there's the Internet thing. One of the most infuriating things about staying in nice hotels is that, unlike a places like Hampton Inn or Motel 6, you have to pay for Wifi. There's no justification for this; making Wifi available in a hotel costs them almost nothing and yet they're perfectly comfortable charging you $10 a day for it, unless you're a high level frequent guest. So here the bellman seemed almost perturbed at the notion that we might have to pay for Internet and so brought us an access code for one computer and had the guest services person call and say not to worry that they would take the charges off the bill. This should serve notice to anyone ever staying at a nice hotel that you should ask for almost anything because they just might do it for you.