The Best Hotel Values in America, Volume II

How do they do it? They buy fewer vowels, and pass the savings on to you!

Welcome to Part 2 ofour look at America’s biggest business-traveler hotel chains.  We looked at room prices and amenities for 5 different chains, and chains of chains. See our previous post for which features we deem important, and which we can live without. The chains we looked at were Hampton Inn (a division of Hilton), La Quinta, Marriott and its sub-brands, Holiday Inn, and Choice Hotels and its sub-brands.

Marriott includes:

  • SpringHill Suites
  • Courtyard
  • Marriott (just “Marriott”, no qualifier except “Hotels and Resorts”)
  • everything from Ritz-Carlton to something called EDITION Hotels. Just in case you thought the medial capital letter in “SpringHill” was douchey, they’ve given you an entire word surrendered to the typographic insanity of contemporary branding.

Choice Hotels include:

  • Comfort Inn
  • Comfort Suites
  • Quality Inn
  • Sleep Inn
  • a bunch of others such as Clarion, Rodeway Inn, and EconoLodge that don’t really fit the definition of a business-traveler hotel. (The first too Park Place, the second and third too Baltic Avenue.)

Of course room prices, even intra-chain ones, fluctuate daily. We’re not going to examine a year’s worth of prices among all chains for a post that’s going to sit at the top of our page for 3 days at most, so we selected hotels closest to the airport in 5 disparate cities (Minneapolis; Macon, Georgia; Seattle; Lubbock, Texas; St. George, Utah.) Within reason, mind you: if you had to travel an extra mile from the airport to save $30 at another hotel in the chain, we went with the cheaper hotel. This was for a 1-night stay on April 1, 2011 – a day near no major holiday, nor any big local events that we know of. Get ready for some self-explanatory charts!

Price ($)MINMACSEALUBSTGAvg
Hampton Inn999584.1592.6595.2093.20
La Quinta696982759477.80
Marriott59C99M104C130C159C110.20
Holiday Inn84.1580899611392.43
Choice63.15F51Q57Q76.50Q87M66.9

M=generic Marriott, C=Courtyard
F=Comfort Inn, Q=Quality Inn

Smoke?MINMACSEALUBSTG
Hampton InnNOYESYESNOYES
La QuintaYESYESYESYESNO
MarriottNONOYESYESYES
Holiday InnYESNOYESYESYES
ChoiceYESYESYESNONO
Internet?MINMACSEALUBSTG
Hampton Innwirelesswiredwiredwiredwireless
La Quintawirelesswiredwirelesswiredwireless
Marriottwiredwireless ($10)wiredwirelesswireless
Holiday Innwiredwirelesswirelesswirelesswireless
Choicewirelesswiredwirelesswirelesswireless
Breakfast/
microwave & fridge?
MINMACSEALUBSTG
Hampton InnYES/NOYES/NOYES/NOYES/NOYES/YES
La QuintaYES/NOYES/YESYES/NOYES/NOYES/YES
MarriottNO/NONO/NONO/NONO/NONO/NO
Holiday InnNO/NOYES/YESNO/YESYES/YESYES/YES
ChoiceYES/NOYES/YESYES/YESYES/YESNO/YES
Laundry?MINMACSEALUBSTG
Hampton Innvaletselfvaletvaletvalet
La Quintaselfselfselfnoneself
Marriottselfselfnonenoneself
Holiday Innselfselfselfselfself
Choicevaletselfselfselfself

Observations:

Amazingly, at least to us, most hotels in 2011 allow smoking. The good news is that in the hotels that do, fewer than 10% of the rooms are devoted to accommodating the practice of that vile, repulsive, loathsome, nauseating habit. May we one day as a nation progress to the point where prejudice and bigotry are forever things of the past, except when practiced against that class of Cro-Magnons who pollute the air far more tangibly than any coal refinery does. But given that almost all rooms forbid smoking, no wonder it’s usually easy to get a non-smoking room.

The Holiday Inn in St. George welcomes pets for $25, a good deal considering that most hotels we surveyed would just as soon have Fluffy and Mittens sleep in your car.  The Marriott in Lubbock charges $100, which is almost the same thing.

The Twin Cities airport Holiday Inn doesn’t comp you on breakfast, but does offer a $20 voucher. Not per person, per room. At least one CYC author could eat $10 worth of hotel breakfast food in his sleep. And while the folks at the Holiday Inn in St. George apparently love animals, they also close the laundry room between 11 pm and 7 am, a cruel joke to play on anyone who’s been hiking Zion Canyon all day in the middle of summer.

Walmart sells microwaves for $55 and mini-fridges (with freezer) for $75.  These chains could buy thousands of each for what, 80% of Walmart retail? Amortize those prices over the useful life of each appliance, and it wouldn’t add more than a few pennies a day to the cost of a room. Yet most hotels in our sample still don’t let you do some rudimentary cooking.

The march to full wireless internet access continues. Curiously, it appears that wireless internet is being adopted faster than the relatively ancient technologies of refrigeration and microwaving. If wirelessness is important to you (e.g. if you’re traveling as a pair and can only plug one computer into an Ethernet cable at a time), it doesn’t hurt to request a room close to the router upon check-in. Or ask the clerk not to put you in a room in which people traditionally complain about the reception.

To us, valet laundry “service” is the opposite of a convenience. Which would you prefer to return to when you’ve been in meetings all day – expensively laundered clothes that are hopefully all accounted for, or being able to pay $1.50 to clean your clothes at your leisure? In those hotels that don’t simply have a coin-operated laundry room, getting your clothes cleaned can be more trouble than it’s worth. The author once spent two weeks in China cleaning his clothes in hotel bathtubs. We’re supposed to be beyond that in the Western Hemisphere.

Marriott doesn’t exactly offer value. They do restrict smoking as much as anyone does, but as we’re finding out, that doesn’t seem to make that much of a difference. Marriott’s maddening series of sub-brands can make it confusing to find a hotel sometimes, plus as you can see, their prices vary the most of any chain we measured. They’re also the one chain that’s embraced the European tactic of adding a separate charge for going online. If you’re in Macon, look for a Wi-Fi hotspot in the McDonald’s parking lot next door.

Our conclusion?

If this were a scientific experiment, our hypothesis would have been that Hampton Inn is the best in its class. The desk clerks are almost always polite and helpful, and the breakfast alone usually saves us far more than (what we originally assumed was) any tiny difference in price between chains. But if we had to pick a winner, we’d go with Choice Hotels – not only do they win on price in 4 out of 5 cities (losing by 50¢ in the 5th), but they have less smoking, more kitchen appliances, more complimentary food and more convenient internet access than anyone else.

**This post is featured in the Festival of Frugality #270-Spring is Coming (One of These Days) Edition**

and

Yakezie Carnival: March 6th Edition

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