Tag: Sheraton

A Look Back At Our Hotel Stays Of 2018

Here we are, at the end of 2018. When looking back at our hotel stays from the past year, I get a sense of how we traveled and how it compared to previous years. I make travel decisions based on how I think we travel but if those trends are changing, I’ll need to adapt the methods I use when looking at the best way to maximize our points usage and out of pocket spending. When I look back at 2018, I’m really happy how everything turned out. Going into the year, due to some work changes, I knew that saving cash on hotel stays would be a priority. I never really focused on earning hotel points before but I’m a quick study and I set a goal to not pay for a hotel room if I could help it.

I did really good in achieving my goal. We stayed in hotels for 37 nights and only paid $1000. When I paid cash for a room there was a specific reason I did so. The rest of our hotel stays were paid for by points or free nights earned by having certain hotel credit cards. Here’s a breakdown of our stays for the year:

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Hotel Review : Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel – Manhattan, New York

For us, miles and points are a way to travel the way we want to. Sometimes that’s flying in business class to Japan and other times that’s staying in a luxury hotel in Austria. However, it also means having the ability to stay in exactly the hotel we want when we want to stay there. This review is about one of those latter type of hotel stays.

We’ve stayed in several hotels around Times Square and have our favorites. This hotel stay was different. Besides running this website, one of the things we like to do is sing.  In fact, we were fortunate to get the chance to sing at Carnegie Hall in a show with a New York-based concert production company in February. After getting the schedule, we saw that the show rehearsals were being held at the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel.  There were award nights available at the hotel for the days we needed, so I went and booked a five night stay for our trip. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed our stay and I’m adding it to our list of places we’d be willing to stay again.

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We Had Access To A Hotel Club Lounge – Here’s What It Was Like

We just returned from a trip to New York City. While I have my list of hotels that we like to stay at, this trip we opted to go off our map for a few big reasons and I booked five nights at the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel. I’ll be writing about our entire stay in another post (and the reasons we picked this hotel) but I wanted to share my feelings about our access to a hotel perk we usually don’t get to experience, the club lounge.

Main-Exterior

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Starwood & Marriott Winter Hotel Promotions Are Out!!

I previously wrote about the winter promotions for IHG and Hilton. But with all of the Hurricane Irma excitement, I missed out on the promos that Starwood and Marriott announced this past week. Now that things are getting back to normal, I’m checking to see if any of these are valuable. As always, if you think you might be eligible for any promotion, it pays to register even if you don’t take advantage of it. Otherwise you might forget or miss out on the registration date.

Here are the details for each promotion:

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Looking For Off-Property Hotels Around Disneyland When “Plan A” (DVC) Didn’t Work Out

I’ve already documented in a previous article the difficulties I came across when trying to book a room at Disneyland with my DVC points, and now it was time to start looking at Plan B, Plan C and, if needed, Plan D. Now, I don’t have much experience with booking hotels in and around Disneyland. We’ve stayed in the Grand Californian and Disneyland Hotel several times. Going back many years ago, we stayed at the Sheraton Anaheim Hotel (now renamed the Anaheim Majestic Garden Hotel) with a group discount from a theme park message board we helped moderate. On our most recent trip, we stayed at the Sheraton Park Hotel at the Anaheim Resort (that’s a mouthful). It wasn’t my original choice, but I was lucky enough to win a free night during a online contest that had to be Continue reading “Looking For Off-Property Hotels Around Disneyland When “Plan A” (DVC) Didn’t Work Out”