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February 18, 2006

A Simple Fellow, With Simple Tastes

Why I Will Never Again Stay With The Morgan’s Hotel Group

At the risk of whinging and/ or posting an entire column that should otherwise be featured under the “Aggravating/ Enjoyable Travel Note of the Week” heading in Peter King’s Monday Morning Quarterback column on cnnsi.com, I need to share some quick thoughts on my recent week of business travel. Specifically, I need to share in re: my hotel choices throughout the trip.

As business travelers go, I’m a pretty easy customer. That is, I’m not the sort of person who asks for another room, writes angry letters, demands upgrades, all that nonsense. If I’m traveling against a fixed budget, the hotel is not where I want to devote scarce resources; I’m more than willing to trade a nice hotel room for convenient flight times and interesting meals. Usually this means that I end up in generic and/ or dumpy middle-of-the-road hotel chains, and usually, I’m pretty chill with that. So long as the hotel has a few simple conveniences (a kitchen that’s open late, a quiet place to drink a beer while I read, and solid internet access), I’m wearing my happy pants.

This past week, however, I decided to go a little trendy. Not super trendy, mind you, or super expensive, just the equivalently priced trendy hotel instead of the middle-of-the-road chain. Why not, I figured. I was going to be in cool places (San Francisco and New York), so why not stay in a place with some style. Thus did I end up at two properties run by the Morgan’s Hotel Group.

Generally speaking, they did the trick on the trendy front. Both were very dark (trendy hotels should be dark! It’s sexy and mysterious!) and featured bars with overpriced cocktails. Both had a reasonably attractive staff with just enough attitude to impress the tourists (nothing says trendy hotel quite like staff that are borderline rude to customers – this place must be good…the bellboy just sneered at me!). Never mind that we all know that the New York one is a little “four years ago”; it was more interesting than the Hilton.

All that said, there is absolutely no way I will ever stay at a Morgan’s Hotel Group property ever again. My reasons why:

(1) You can’t close the kitchen at 11:30: I had to work pretty late this week, and didn’t roll back to the hotel until well past eleven each night. When I tried to order dinner on Wednesday at 11:45, wasn’t I surprised to find out that the kitchen had closed at 11:30. 11:30? In New York? The city itself has 24-hour room service; how can this hotel offer service that’s significantly worse than the diner across the street? I was hungry. I’m not asking for a the full menu, but hook a brother up with at least a sandwich or something. Thursday night I ended up at the diner across the street. And was pretty happy about it.

(2) Kindly refrain from kicking me out of your bar(s) an unprecedented five (5) times within an hour: In the absence of a dinner option, I met some friends for drinks at the hotel on Thursday evening. We started in the relatively mellow “Library” bar. Last call came about an hour before we expected. Fine. After first trying not to let us enter said bar, they waited about five minutes before telling us we needed to go (we were sitting on a couch). Fine. We went across the lobby to the other bar, which was packed with 24-year-old white-collar apprentices trying to dry-hump each other to eight-year-old hip-hop. It was worth it for the show, at the least. Of course, they were about to close as well, and the bouncers approached us first (in a room full of people) to let us know we needed to go. Fine. We took our beers and sat in a couch in a sitting area in the lobby. Ten minutes later (the bar still had people in it), they told us we needed to leave. Again. “But I’m staying here!” “You still need to go.” Fine, I just need to use the bathroom. I returned from the bathroom just in time to be asked not to stand where we were standing in the lobby. It wasn’t like it was 5 a.m.; it was hours before NYC closing time. Ridiculous. So we moved our parties and our dollars across the street to the above-mentioned diner. You can stay here, but you can’t stand here.

(3) The rumors in re: the rooms at the New York one are true: yes, it was the smallest hotel room I’ve ever stayed in, and I’ve been to Japan a couple times. This room was small. Comically small. Rhode-Island-could-kick-the-crap-out-of-it-in-a-war small. We’re talking small.

(4) My number-one product attribute and decision criteria as a business traveler: the web access at both the Clift and the Hudson was abhorrent. As if it isn’t bad enough that they charged a whopping ten bucks a day for the right to connect (a crappy and vulgar little profit center if there ever was one), the connection was spotty at best. It had some sort of crap proxy server messing with me such that I couldn’t connect to my corporate network, and it flashed in and out all week. If I’m traveling for work, I need to be able to work. Being able to connect to the Internet is a big part of my work. If I can’t connect to Internet at your hotel, then I can’t work there, and I can’t be your customer. It’s bad enough that you extorted $40 from me; for those prices, it should at least freakin work.

Thus will I never stay at your hotel again. Ever.

Note: my business travels continue this week, with a return to the People’s Republic of China. You can be confident I will be more than eager to post about it if the Internet access there is more reliable than at my hotels in San Francisco and New York this past week. And I won’t be shocked if it is.

Posted by thatkid at February 18, 2006 9:59 PM under ThatKid

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