Hotel Shortcomings

Once upon a time, I wouldn't think of staying at a hotel that was more than a hundred dollars a night. Unfortunately, if you pick a hotel based on its proximity to some place you'd like to be, the prices aren't so good. Thus, I've stayed in downtown San Diego, in downtown-ish Seattle, and in downtown Portland. Something in common with all three. Expensive hotels.

You would think, for that kind of money, they might think of trying to, you know, improve the hotel in some way?

I can name three things that generally bother me about hotels. First, they seem to ignore that televisions have been getting larger and larger, and with it, the price tag has also become enormous. A large television in the 90s cost several hundred dollars. Now it costs several thousand dollars. Even though hotels make a fair bit of money (or not), I've never seen a high-def television in a hotel.

Second thing. Wireless connectivity. A hotel is sufficiently large that wireless connections are not always great throughout the entire hotel. When I was in Seattle near the airport, I had a wired connection. That was good. I had one in Portland. It was godawful. The connection speed was at dial-up speeds.

Here was the issue. I wanted to install Xcode on my Mac. It allows you to write programs and such. It's also frickin huge. As in 1G huge. The conference center I was at limited bandwidth to 60 K per second. Reasonably good, though I can get three times that much at my house. My hotel was at 6 K a second. It was awful. You could barely get YouTube to work. I was trying to watch Tony and Mike's short sports segment on the Washington Post newssite. No good. Maybe they noticed, because after a while, it said "You don't have enough bandwidth to have a pleasant viewing experience." I'll say.

At the convention center, it would take three hours to download a 1G file. About halfway into this download, it failed. Fortunately, I got one at an Apple Store in town, and it took them 1 hour to download it.

If you can't get good wireless, get a good wired connection, I saw, and stop fooling people into thinking any wireless is good wireless. Bandwidth matters.

What was my third point? Oh yes, the gyms. Most of them suck horribly. The best gyms I've gone too are the one in San Diego, but literally, this was because the hotel was connected to the gym and had special privileges; the one in Cornell, which was a bit surprising, though the gym was tiny; and the one in Bangalore, but then the hotel costs were like three times as much.

Most gyms have equipment circa 1980, and they don't seem all that concerned upgrading it for the same reasons they don't upgrade televisions. It's expensive. A good piece of equipment might be several thousand dollars. And you have to replace it every few years. Still, compared with fitting each hotel room with decent HDTV's, this would seem to be a relative bargain. You would need, say, two recumbent bikes, four ellipticals, four treadmills, and you're all set.

Most places don't even have three pieces of equipment, and they are horrid. A real gym couldn't survive with such bad equipment, and yet decent hotels often do.

What else? Hotels that don't control their own parking. I was in a Seattle hotel that charged me daily use of their parking. Hotels that don't have round the clock services. When grocery stores and restaurants are now 24 hours, you wonder why a hotel that charges as much as it does, can't afford to have 24 hour service.

Cable selections usually suck, having a fraction of what real people have. This was especially the case in Bangalore. In the US, this lack of choice often drives pay per view television, which either means older movies from theaters or porn. Ah, hotels and their discreet entertainment. (It was neither in Bangalore, by the way, since the country has puritan airs about it).

Ah, noisy heating and A/C. This doesn't really bother me, since the noise is like white noise to me. It kinda helps me to sleep in any case.

I'm sure I can think of others (noon checkout times, etc), but those are tops on my list.