Hotel Reviews

TICKET readers sound off about their hotel stays:

Send your comments (positive and negative) about your experiences at hotels to us at ticketatl@travelskills.com! Keep them SHORT and SWEET. (One or two paragraphs only.) We will post them here.

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May 2000

TORONTO HILTON ... From William Mills: I stayed at the Toronto Hilton recently which is being remodeled. The lobby wasn't done yet but the rooms were COOL, the hippest Hilton I've ever stayed at. They had a Ruth Chris in the basement which was very convenient.

February 2000

HOTEL HIGH SPEED INTERNET ACCESS . . . From Dave@Brandman.org : Keep up the good work. In today's AJC column (2/7/00) you write about the new availability of high speed net links. I've had two occasions to try this out now; once at the Marriott Marquis in NYC and once at the Omni in Broomfield, CO. The experience at the Omni was much better. As you reported, Marriott uses the STSN system. They do provide in the room an Ethernet cable, a USB cable and a CD. My laptop has an Ethernet card and I carry my own cable, so I simply plugged in my laptop to the STSN box and booted up. When you first bring up IE, you are automatically brought to an in-house screen advertising the service and Marriott. There are a few pages you can browse without incurring charges, but are warned to continue on to the external net, there is a $9.95 charge per day for usage. BTW, there is no other place in the room that informs you of the charge. Performance was erratic. Like being on a cable system; faster when no one else is on; slower during peak periods. Browsing the net did not seem significantly faster than my 56K modem. Downloads showed a performance boost; but speeds would frequently slow down to a crawl. Twice, the systems hung. Not my PC, but the STSN box. Called STSN and even after resetting the box, it still came back up in a hung state. It cleared itself after about 15 minutes both times. In both cases, the system hung during a download. Marriott was kind enough to reverse out the $9.95 charge and admitted the system has not been fully tested yet. At the Omni, there is simply an Ethernet plug in the way next to the phone jack. No instructions; no Ethernet cables for guest use that I could find. I plugged in and IE came up in my normal homepage. Performance was like being on an office T1 line. Browsing was snappy and downloads were very fast. Found out the system is run by Bayport and if you go to their homepage, it does provide a help number and inform you about the system and the charges. I was very happy with the system. At a Hilton I stayed at recently (Pearl River, NY), there was also an Ethernet port, but no signal was present. So far, my company has not balked at the $9.95 charges. Amazing thing was the Marriott in NYC did not tax the $9.95 but the Omni in Broomfield did.

January 2000

INCONSISTENT WESTINS . . . . From: babeard@mindspring.com: When I stayed at the Westin (Atlanta-Concourse) three weeks ago while visiting a friend passing through town, I was appalled. Even though the lobby was as beautiful as ever, the newly redone hallways and rooms were atrocious looking. They may have great comforters, but that's it. I have never seen such ugly, cheap furniture in a hotel room in my life. Yes, even the new Comfort Inns and all along that line look better than this stuff. I really hated the corkboard looking wall at the head of the bed. Who in the world thought that one up? The side tables were so tiny, they nailed the aluminum-looking tiny lamps into the wall. All the furniture was as dark as you can get. The only thing the furniture matched was the darkness of the hallways. It's probably good that they weren't well-lit, as I've never seen such a combination of "puke green" and brown. Gone were any signs of life, including plants, furniture, paintings, mirrors, or lamps. They even took the lamp out of the foyer and covered all receptacles with plastic plates. The room service food was terrible. I've eaten there many times when it was the Doubletree. I was extremely disappointed at how cold everything was.

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