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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