Tag: Sheraton

How We Found A Reasonable Rate At A NYC Chain Hotel That Had No Resort Fee

Finding hotel rooms in Manhattan is always a challenge. The sheer number of options available could easily cause travelers to throw up their hands and roll the dice, taking whatever hotel Priceline picks for them. We’re not that type of traveler. We need to know the hotel we’re staying at, check to see if the hotel gets good reviews and still get to stay there at what we consider to be a reasonable price.

people across on intersection
Photo by Vlad Alexandru Popa on Pexels.com

For each trip, there are different factors that give me a hint of where to start looking. For this stay, we were going for four nights. If it was a five-night stay, I’d look at Marriott or Hilton properties because you get the fifth night free on reward stays. If I had the IHG Premier, I could look at one of their hotels since they offer a fourth night free on reward stays, but we’re keeping our Select versions of the IHG cards for now.

When I hear four-night hotel stay, there’s only one other thing that pops into my mind. Citi Prestige fourth-night free! All I need to do is find a hotel I like at a reasonable rate and I’ll get 25% of the room rate charges refunded. Granted, Citi doesn’t refund the taxes or any additional resort fees, so you end up saving less than 25% but still, that’s a great discount for a hotel in Manhattan. Continue reading “How We Found A Reasonable Rate At A NYC Chain Hotel That Had No Resort Fee”

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.

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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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