Posted on December 10, 2007 - by Venik

Grand Hyatt New York, Part I

So here I am, sitting in my overpriced room on the 23-rd floor of the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan. The problem is not with the room – the room is not bad. A little dusty, but OK. I am not a picky person. I’ve seen worse.

There was something gelatinous floating in the toilet, so I flushed it. I wanted to take a photo of it – you know, for the science – but then I decided to just flush it. But the room is good.

The two Teledex phones in the room have a noisy line even when calling the service desk. This is strange: the phones don’t look that old. Maybe only ten years old. Fifteen at most. So the phones are noisy and a little dusty, but the handset cord was neatly wrapped around the phone and the room is great.

The cable TV is also noisy. Maybe the tube came as a set with the phones.

The bathroom is small and for $600+ per night its tiny. On the plus side, both the tub and the sink are also tiny, so as a set, everything looks well in proportion. But the room is excellent.

What’s the first thing you do when you settle down in your hotel room? You find an Internet connection. The room was advertised as having high-speed Internet. What wasn’t advertised was the $9.99/day charge from T-Mobile. And the connection is not very high-speed. Not at all. In fact, the only high-speed connection available is in the business center on the conference level. So, unless you sleep in the hotel’s lobby, the promised high-speed Internet connection in your room is not really there. But the room is great.

Room service is neither fast nor affordable. Let’s say you wanted a cup of coffee in the morning. The cup of coffee will cost you $8, plus $5 “delivery fee”, plus 15% service charge, plus state and city tax. Granted, it will be Starbucks coffee, but it will be lukewarm. Which is not surprising, since it takes half-an-hour to have your coffee delivered to your room.

I arrived at around 10pm. I though about just going to sleep, but got held up by Law and Order and realized that I was hungry. I decided not to notice the absurd prices and fees and ordered a Caesar salad with grilled chicken and green tea with lemon. Why drink tea at midnight if you know you have to get up at 6:30am? Silly you: how else would you stay up until 4am updating your blog? Anyway, Caesar salad.

The salad and tea arrived in exactly 40 minutes. The chicken was room temperature with tell-tale signs of being microwaved (sometime in the past 40 minutes, I guess). The lemon was actually an assorti of several different lemons that looked like they were cut using a dull ax. Surprisingly, the water in the thermos was hot. Here’s an idea for Hyatt management: a thermos for grilled chicken. If you like bread rolls with butter, Hyatt is the place to go: four different varieties of bread rolls were discovered under a blue napkin. All hard as a rock.

I was hungry, so I ate all of it. Besides, when I buy a Caesar salad for $49.57, I will eat it no matter what. Otherwise I won’t be able to sleep with myself at night. I can’t wait for tomorrow’s fifty-dollar Continental breakfast with $8 cup of tea. The room, though, is absolutely wonderful.

I should probably thank Hyatt for all of these little problems: I am not paying $600+ per night to sit in my hotel room in Manhattan, eat cold chicken and slowly browse the Internet. I can do that back home in Delaware. I came here to have fun, and the hotel room is just for sleeping.

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