New Orleans, Adequate, No More, No Less
Written: Jun 22 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: clean, well maintained room in quirk-free hotel
Cons: smallish room, elevated price, limited service, devoid of any character
The Bottom Line: Clean, predictable, quirk free room and hotel works fine for short-term business trips. For extended (>3 night) or vacation stays, I'd suggest looking elsewhere.
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| savonarola's Full Review: Doubletree |
In New Orleans for a conference plus extended weekend. Conference booking service offered up the Doubletree New Orleans @ 300 Canal Street as a compromise between the (truely gargantuan) Morial Convention Center and the French Quarter.
Room
Room was on the smallish side for one person for an extended (8 day) stay; it would have been quite cramped for a couple over the same time period. Closet and drawer space was limited; room was equipped with a single table, two upholstered chairs, and a smallish armchair in addition to the requested king bed. Room itself was quite clean and odor free; furnishings were in good repair without noticable stains or damage, or fraying. The request for a room on a high floor was honored (12th floor) but the stated "river view" room actually had only one narrow slit-like window (cleverly expanded by a full wall-width curtain) looking over the postage-stamp sized outdoor swimming pool and an unremarkable cityscape.
The room was generally quiet, with minimal noise intrusion from the hallway and adjacent rooms, and none from the street. The one exception was that whenever people opened the door to the room next door it sounded like somebody was entering my room, to the point that I actually propped a chair in front of the locked door interconnecting the two rooms until I confirmed that it wasn't this door being opened. This interconnecting door could have used a more substantial lock, too.
Location
Hotel was centrally located between the Morial convention center (approximately 1/2 mile walk) and the French Quarter, with Bourbon Street being approximately 7 blocks away (the hotel advertises itself as being variously in the French Quarter or on the edge of the French Quarter. The closest contact was approximately 2 blocks). The land-based Harrah's casino was directly across the street, the aquarium and riverwalk area about two blocks away.
Cost
Booking through the typically inflated conference service yielded a nightly rate of $127, on top of which was a 17% room tax, and a $2 fee of some type. Discussion with a couple of other guests found that one was paying $89, while the other was paying a last-minute rack rate of about $145. Hotels in New Orleans appear to run on the pricy side, but I suspect that there were better deals to be had (the moderately priced, but very trendy "W" Hotel a block away was running a special rate of $129/night.
Both local and "800" telephone calls were billed at $1 per shot, an annoying money maker. The room was equipped with a second independent telephone line for modem use and had been fitted with an ethernet port for "high speed" internet access (additional comments below) billed at an eye-watering $10.95/day. Although this fee was supposed to be tacked onto the room bill, I never ended up being charged.
Service
Hotel staff was friendly and accomodating when asked for assistance, but had to be asked in all cases (i.e. they weren't either particularly observant or working to anticipate guests needs). Had to ask for a bellman to take my bags to my room, ask for a cab whenever I needed one, etc, etc.
Service hours were limited; on all but Friday and Saturday nights (when it was supposedly extended to 24 hours/day), room service stopped at 10 PM. I had to check out at 5:45 AM to catch an early morning flight and was told that a bellman wasn't available until 6:00 AM, meaning that in addition to carrying my bags I had to march down the street a short distance to wake a sleeping cab driver.
Room was equipped with standard amenities (miniature bottles of bath stuph, hair dryer, and mini-coffee maker) plus an ironing board and iron. 27" television had the expected cable services (HBO, CNN, etc.) and no problems with reception.
Room was equipped with an ethernet port for "high-speed" internet access supposedly billed at an exorbitant $10.95/day (the charge was never posted to my bill). Connected to my Win98 laptop (had to leave my beloved Macs behind on this trip) already set up for DHCP, there was no adjustments or tweaking needed to establish a net connection. The connection used some kind of weird proxy server, however, resulting in my web browser frequently being redirected to the hotel's internal home page and a proprietary email/messaging package (an older version of SoftArc's FirstClass) used by the office intermittently faulting out. Connection speed was nowhere near to the 1.2 Mb/sec advertised; yielding numbers more on the order of 350 Kb/sec.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
savonarola
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Location: San Francisco, California
Reviews written: 3
Trusted by: 0 members
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