I booked this on Priceline, plugging in price and neighborhood, not knowing the specific hotel until I booked. The is the old Boston city jail. There are brick walls and some cutesy jail-related relics around the reception area. Besides that, you’d know immediately that you were in an upscale hotel in Boston, or maybe Boise, Bratislava, Ulan Bator or Perth.
I figured parking would be expensive, maybe $60. It’s $69. The valet took my car and told me that I would get a retrieval code by text in five minutes. 50 hours later it hadn’t arrived.
My room was comfortable and bland. The internet did not work. I tried to call down for help, but the desk phone didn’t work. Neither did the phone by the bed. I went down and eventually they sent up a tech who insisted on trying to fix the phone even though I only wanted the internet fixed. I quickly realized that this tech knew less about computers than I do.
Think about that.
Two additional techs later one of them cobbled together a patch that got me on line. The phones never got fixed, which was fine.
The 2nd floor reception area has the usual seats and sofas. The 1st floor, where you wait for your car, has no seats, no sofas, no benches, so you stand, although you could just stretch out on the floor while you wait. Fortunately I got to sit on a luggage cart.
Kim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc is a $12 wine. They offer it on the mini-bar. I would have thought that forty bucks was a pretty steep price, but that was for a half bottle, so I thought it was a very steep price.
On a more positive note, my room door opened from the inside.
Dan Kravitz
