Kimpton Archives - Your Mileage May Vary

The Hotel Toiletries That You Could Use As Part Of Thanksgiving Dinner

Whereas Joe collects and uses just about every bar of soap he can get from a hotel, I’m not one to use the hotel’s toiletries a whole lot. I have no huge reason to not use them, other than the fact that I really like the soap and shampoo/conditioner that I bring with me. But I’ll always check them out, because sometimes I’ll find one that I really like for occasional home use – the lemon & sage Bliss collection that they have at the W, for example, smells really nice.

Anyway, we stayed at the Kimpton Gray Hotel in Chicago not long ago, and in checking out their toiletries, I swear, I think you could use some of them as part of a Thanksgiving meal. No, really! Take a look…

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Our Two Night Stay In A Chicago Life Insurance Building

It’s not often that you get to stay overnight in a life insurance building that opened back in 1894, but Kimpton isn’t your everyday hotel chain. Now part of the IHG family of brands, Kimpton has a flair for taking extraordinary spaces and turning them into phenomenal hotels. The Kimpton Gray in Chicago is a perfect example.

I’ve already written about how I used my IHG Select Credit Card free night certificate to pay for the room instead of paying the $400+ a night that rooms were going for at the time. The Gray fit our needs for a quick weekend in Chicago, it was located in the Loop and right off the CTA from O’Hare and the United Center. While rooms at this hotel can be expensive, they’re really nice.

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I’m Gonna Miss The Unlimited Free Night From The IHG Credit Card

My favorite perk of the no longer available IHG Select credit card was the free night you could use at any IHG hotel worldwide. When Chase revamped the cards this year, one of the changes with the free night benefit of the new IHG Premier card was that redemptions became limited to rooms costing 40,000 points or less.

Since current cardholders were given one more year to take advantage of the unlimited night, I had to make it count.

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My Current Pet Peeve With Hotels

If you travel enough, there will always be something that bothers you. Sharon’s written about the behavior of people at airports. Personally, I’m always aggravated when hotels don’t put enough power outlets in a room but I can forgive hotels for that (well, to an extent) because maybe when the room was designed, people didn’t plug in as many things. My current pet peeve is different and something is so simple for a hotel to fix that I can’t stand when I have to deal with it.

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The Joys of Being Disloyal

To our new friends who may be visiting from Forbes.com, welcome! We are Joe and Sharon and we’re a married couple, originally from the northeast (he’s from Linden, NJ, she’s originally from Brooklyn, and then Staten Island, NY) but now living in Orlando, Florida. Joe is the one who is majorly into the points and miles and he writes most of our articles that have to do with miles, points, credit cards, airlines, hotels, tricks of the trade, etc. Sharon is the proofreader and tends to write the more diverse entries. If you’d like to look at more of our blog, click here to get to our home page of Your Mileage May Vary. Or maybe consider joining our Facebook group. We hope you like what you see! And now on to our post about the joys of being disloyal:

When it comes to making travel reservations, I’m disloyal. There, I said it and, truth be told, I get a bit of a thrill in making that statement. You see, I’m an Eagle Scout. Therefore, loyalty is part of the deal. Right here, second on the list behind being trustworthy.

A Scout is:

Trustworthy,
Loyal,
Helpful,
Friendly,
Courteous,
Kind,
Obedient,
Cheerful,
Thrifty,
Brave,
Clean,
and Reverent.

So why am I not loyal when it comes to my travel? Simply stated, I don’t travel enough to Continue reading “The Joys of Being Disloyal”