Thoughts on the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel
GECCO is being held in the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel in D.C. It’s a pretty high end deal, but with the three of us sharing the room and the tab, we figured it was worth it for the convenience of being in the conference hotel. That strategy has worked well in the past, but not so well this time…
The hotel is indeed fairly expensive and trying to be all ritzy, but comes off as mostly cheesy and money grubbing. Given what we’re paying, you’d think that “Wireless internet available in all the rooms” would mean free wireless internet, especially since we got free wireless in all over Ann Arbor at much cheaper hotels at GPTP. But no… They want $10/day (or $24 for 3 days - woot?), which is incredibly annoying!
The services have been nice enough, and you can’t argue with the location two blocks from the mall, but the hotel is full of nickel and dime stuff that’s clearly a con game to get money from people who are desperate or dim. $6 for a bottle of water?!? $2.25 for a snickers bar?!? $10/day for internet?!?
You’d be better off at a Holiday Inn or Days Inn or such like a little farther out of town near a metro stop and then coming into town everyday. Humph.
P.S. To make things worse, they want each of use to pay that $10/day for wireless. Being highly nerdly, however, we figured out how to have one of us pay, and then feed that to another laptop with a piece of ethernet cable I happened to have with me (don’t you carry one everywhere?), which could then feed network to the third laptop via using their wireless cards. My, that was fun :-).
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June 28th, 2005 at 12:39
Wave to Mrs. Donkey is you see her. She is at the Hotel Washington for one more day attending a conference on gerentology and nutrution or something like that.
June 30th, 2005 at 16:46
Thanks! Hope she had a great time. My conference went very well, but getting home continues to be (I’m currently in Pittsburgh) has been pretty hellacious (mostly due to weather, although US Air ain’t exactly my friend at the moment).
Oh, and wireless access is free in the Pittsburgh airport (which I’m quite enjoying).
We mentioned how frustrated we were with the wireless situation at the hotel when we checked out this morning, and she said they’d done that because non-guests were coming in and “stealing” the wireless in the lobby. Which of course misses the point that one can implement access control without introducing ludicrous charges. Sigh.
July 1st, 2005 at 13:57
The economics of ‘free’ wireless may someday lead to treating it as a public common good, like the highways of yore. Everything old is new again.
July 2nd, 2005 at 17:58
That would be a nice outcome if it happens. Hard the imagine the current administration deciding, however, that it’s in the “public good” to ensure that there’s comprehensive free wireless. They’re much more likely to approve of L’Enfant’s make-’em-pay model.
Interestingly, the AmericInn I ended up spending Thursday night in after finally arriving in MPLS/St Paul after 1pm (long story) was in the middle of rennovations (another story), but had free wireless. It was nice to be connected again :-).
Now I’m home, which is even better!