Hilton Anaheim

I don't get Hilton Hotels. I can't characterize them in any meaningful way. Nice? Luxurious? Modern? Old fashioned? Good value? Nicer than a Marriott? Not as nice as a Marriott? They're all over the place. Hilton's new slogan doesn't help much. Here it is:



Nothing like a vapid phrase to help focus that brand, Mr. Hilton. "Travel should take you places" is as meaningless as "walking should take you forward or backward", or "a shower should make you wet". Or "furnaces should heat your house". Or "rakes should gather leaves". Maybe I should start my own ad agency.

To give you an idea how flimsy the Hilton brand is, the sign outside the hotel had two logos of equal size. One, of course, was Hilton. The other, Starbucks. I guess that's a pretty good way to tell how weak the Hilton brand is, and how powerful the Starbucks brand continues to be.

The Hilton Anaheim is big. Big big. That makes sense, because it's right next to Disneyland. (The original, not that parvenu Disney "world" in Florida.) The parking structure is monstrous, and almost impossible to navigate. I tried following the arrows pointing to the elevators, but wound up going the wrong way and nearly t-boning an elderly driver. Once I found a space, the path to the elevators themselves was blocked by a neatly stacked block of about 3,000 chairs. Once you get to the lobby, stand back and look at 70's architecture in all its glory.



The halls are big, too. Or, rather, long. No surprise here.



But in the spirit of the maze-like parking lot, the signage to your room is quite perplexing. What the heck happened to room 5.528? Is it haunted?



You'll have plenty of time to admire the flowing movement of the hallway carpet. At least it's a new twist on the puke resisitant patterns to which I've grown so accustomed.



I was assigned a newly-redecorated room. Hilton paid an advertising agency to come up with a snazzy way of saying this, and they responded with this little embarrassment. "New'd". That way, they could put a sign up in the elevators telling you that you can "sleep in the New'd". HAHAHAHA. What a bunch of cards!

The room carpet seemed kind of old-skool to me. I haven't seen sculpted gray/green carpet in a long time. Truth be told, I hadn't missed it.



I also didn't miss the mis-applied wallpaper, though I did neglect to take a good photo of it. The faulty part is over by the thermostat.



All typical, I guess, of modern-giant-chain-hotel-by-a-big-tourist-attraction-lodging.

The water, however, was not. I made a cup of coffee in the morning, and noticed it tasted kind of funky. So I filled the glass in the bathroom, and was horrified to see that it looked like milk.



Now you might say "hang on, Misterarthur, that's because of an aerator in the faucet." Sorry, sharp-eyed reader, it's not. I know this because there was no aerator on the faucet, because the water ran clear if you let it run long enough, and because no one at the meeting I was attending could drink the ice water they served at lunch.

Oh, and they charged for internet access, too.

The Claremont

Oh, Claremont, why hast thou forsaken me? I was at the Claremont, again. I was hoping I'd get the promised 11th-stay upgrade, even though (of course), I'd lost my golden ticket. (See below). I arrived at the hotel very very late (3:30 AM my time), and was again greeted like the stranger I am not. My room did seem a little bigger than usual. The message light was blinking on my phone when I arrived in the room. It turned out there wasn't a voice message, but there was a note for me at the front desk. How exciting! I thought it would be a congratulatory message about my upgrade. Alas, it wasn't so. The next morning, when I retrieved the message (oddly, they couldn't turn off the blinking message light until they had printed it out), it turned out to be nothing but a hotel-wide notice that the hotel was now providing shuttle service to downtown Oakland. What a heart breaker.

Norfolk Marriott Waterside

I had a short, but nice, stay at the Marriot in Norfolk. This Marriott has very upscale ambitions - perhaps it was going to be a Ritz Carlton (owned by Marriott, you know) but plans were scaled back at the last moment. Here's why I think so. Beyond the grand (and freezing) lobby, the carpet pattern in the elevator landings says Ritz-Carlton Marina Del Rey to me. (See much earlier posts). Check out the giant graphic!



The rooms are very nice, but they played it dim on the hallway lighting.



Maybe they were hoping that you wouldn't notice the peeling wallpaper:



There was a palimpsest of elevator landing devices of yore, too. I can't guess what it could've been. (And, yes, I do know that it's not really a palimpsest. But it is an impressive looking word, so I used it anyway. So there)



And they couldn't have spent more than a minute or two coming up with the imaginatively-named dining room:



I had one very odd thing happen to me. I got in the elevator to go downstairs, the door shut, and the elevator started to descend. It changed its mind after it had gone about 4 inches and slammed to a halt, after which the doors opened. I got off quickly. Later, when I made it downstairs in a different elevator car, I mentioned it to the (very nice) front-desk-person. Walking away, I heard her on the phone saying something like "...the elevator's acting up again..". Yippee

The Atlanta Marriott Alpharetta

2008 begins with a chain. And a hotel that pretends to be in two places at once. It seems a little unfair to the weary traveler to cause him to question his place in the universe, but I'm here to tell you that the Atlanta Marriott Alpharetta is indeed in Alpharetta, and not in Atlanta, where there's another Marriott, called the Marriott Marquis. Got that? The Atlanta Marriott Alpharetta is pretty new, as is the exurb of Alpharetta itself. It has a sort of grandiose entrance hall. When we arrived, the OSU smackdown by LSU was in full play, with the SEC being loudly supported in the bar.
The hall was like most halls in chain hotels:



that is to say, striped wallpaper and wall to wall carpet with a stain-hiding design down the middle. (In this case, sort of tangerine-ish). My room actually had a hall-ish feature, too. Here's the view from the 'bedroom' to the door:



There wasn't much, honestly, to distinguish the Alpharetta version of the Atlanta Marriott from most other Marriotts, though there was one irritant and two things that struck me as a little out-of-the ordinary.

The irritant: A sink that took forever to drain.

Then, this is the first hotel I've stayed in for ages that has its own laundry area:





I can see this in an extended-stay sort of place, but it seemed rather out of place here. (This was a chi chi Marriott, after all).

Finally, there was the permanent glass of beer by the elevators. The first photo was snapped when I checked in (around 9:30 pm), and the second when I left, at 8:30 am.





I do have a question for Mr. Marriott. There's a pecking order for Marriott hotels, and Courtyard by Marriott is lower caste than a "Marriott". So why why why is internet free at the Courtyard, and not free at the more expensive Marriott? Isn't the general rule that paying more actually gets you more? Maybe it's a Mormon thing.

The Sheraton Annapolis Hotel

And so 2007 comes to a close, not with a bang but with a whimper. (I don't believe T.S. Eliot could've imagined a line of his poetry winding up in a blog about hotel hallways, do you?) The Sheraton Annapolis is a completely generic hotel, in a generic outskirt, next to a generic mall, with generic chain restaurants. That can be good, I know, (the best surprise is no surprise, blah blah blah) but it some way it's kind of depressing. No charm, no wit, no individuality. I actually prefer a little weirdness, like the Claremont's landing strip-width halls, or the 70 Park Avenue's out-of-nowhere stairs. This is pure blah...except for the following: One: The Hound's Tooth of the Baskervilles-sized carpet "design".



Don't believe me? Check out the close-up view.



That's not hound's tooth. It's hound's fang.

Two: The odd dust heap on the floor of the elevator...which wouldn't have been worth noting, except for its repeat performance on the landing of the second floor:




Three: The oxymoronic sign on the fire exit door.



Four: Some life-sized Nutcracker guys enlivening the lobby. They were pretty creepy, actually. Here's a legit question: Does anyone really like the Nutcracker? Or is just something you're supposed to like? Do you go see it because it's the thing you have to take your kids to see, or they'll be uncultured? My own belief is that it's very difficult to get into the Christmas spirit when confronted by a set of malformed choppers like these.



Five: False promises. The sign in the hall promises Vending and Ice, so I got all excited.



Closer inspection revealed, however, the reality was actually Plumbing and Ice.



Oh, by the way, just so you know that you're near the Chesapeake Bay, instead of say, Omaha, there are nautical photos in the rooms and the hotel's restaurant is called the Annapolis Grill.

The Annual Golden Hallway Award

As prestigious an award as exists in the hospitality industry, I'm pleased to announce the winner of the 2007 Golden Hallway Award.

Hotel Gault, Montreal, QC

Drum roll, please. The winner of the first Hotel Hallways Golden Hallway Award is the Hotel Gault in Montreal, Canada. Thank God I stayed here before the end of the year, or the award would probably have gone unawarded. Here's why it won. Exhibit A, the lovely, naturally-lit fifth floor hall. Simultaneously modern, yet warm.



Exhibit B. The thankfully non-vomit-stain pattern carpet. It's really refreshing to find a hotel that believes its guests will behave like adults and not park the tiger outside their rooms. (See virtually every post below if you don't know what I mean). Look! Unbelievable!



The Hotel Gault's goodness doesn't end with the Hotel Hallways award-winning hallway. The lobby is super cool, too.



Even the front door is tasty



My room's terrace would've been nice, but Montreal Weather didn't cooperate, dumping 30 cm (measure like the Canadians do!) of snow overnight.



A special shout out to the staff, too, who were uniformly pleasant, helpful, and charming.

All the extra groovy people love it, including the paparazzi-shy blogger extraordinaire, the fabulous style guru Jennifer "Design Hole" Mitchell.