I travel to Austin a few times a year for business, volunteer commitments, and leisure. One of my favorite properties there is the Hyatt Regency Austin. I enjoy the proximity to both SoCo (South Congress) as well as downtown and the University of Texas campus on trips where I have a car. It’s a fairly…
Vegas is fine until you get tired of Vegas. Or when you need Vegas to not be Vegas at all, but just another city you are in for business. That’s why I’m a regular at The Westin Las Vegas Hotel, Casino & Spa (formerly The Westin Casuarina Las Vegas Hotel). Arrival I arrived in a…
I stayed last night at the Westin Los Angeles Airport. It was a comfortable place to be for a Thursday night stay. I was able to return my rental car (after picking up a bottle of wine at BevMo), get takeout from The Daily Grill downstairs, and was up in my room in time for…
I hate early morning drives to the airport. Sometimes its much easier to stay overnight at an airport hotel and avoid the risk of missing my flight due to traffic. That was my aim when I booked a stay at the Sheraton Grand Hotel DFW Airport. Arrival I knew that hotel was wrapping up a…
Occasionally I procrastinate when booking a hotel. My luck is such that I somehow time these episodes when there are major events in town and I am left with a limited range of options to pick from that don’t require me to donate a kidney. That is how I ended up at the Sheraton Atlanta…
My review of the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Casino comes on the heels of a couple dozen other blogger reviews of the same property. A large group of us stayed at the property where BAcon was held last month. Check In We were told that all BAcon attendees could check in at the priority check…
Once in a while, I like to imagine what it would be like to be back in the world of my earlier days in consulting – the ones where my project work had me often spending one or more weeks in the same city so that I had some sense of being anchored each day…
No wonder my purse is always so heavy. I pulled the last three weeks of room keys out of a side pocket this morning and realized I’ve got a lot more catching up to do! I don’t seem to be making any headway and I have another 3-4 stays in the next ten days. But fear…
This 5.5 hour overnight stay may officially qualify as my shortest hotel overnight that was not the result of A) a wild night on the town, B) irregular airline operations, or C) a stay in an international transit hotel. In the case of either of the examples above, I’ve generally known and accepted that the hotel…
Another day, another airport hotel. Sometimes it feels like Groundhogs Day around here. But then something happens that snaps me out of my airport hotel funk… that thing most recently was the Westin Atlanta Airport. Arrival After a shuttle wait at the airport’s ground transportation stop that was anything but chivalrous, I boarded the…
I love the feeling of checking into familiar chain hotels. I do not often get to check into luxury properties, so I have accepted what “my normal” looks like. And nothing screams “normal” to me like consistency. Consistency was exactly what I was looking for when I checked into the Hyatt Place Reno-Tahoe International Airport….
For me, some hotels will always be places where I primarily sleep, no matter the purpose of my trip. Doing hotel reviews for properties like this becomes a bit skewed when no matter what the purpose of my trip, I see the same things on the property each time. The Sheraton Sonoma County Petaluma, in…