rev:text
| - Hotels are by their very nature expository; seldom the reason for a trip itself, they are, nevertheless, ideally a respite from the strange or even exciting city beyond...pacesetters, if you will, a launching pad into the night or at the beginning of each day. They set the stage for your visit.
In that sense, the job of the hotel takes on an increasingly important lustre, becomes quite possibly a prism through which you find yourself fired up or the alternative before the second act of your time begins. The aLoft hotel, intended to serve as sort of a W lite, has a number of things going for it, and oddly enough, as I had just checked out of a W hotel two days earlier in another city, my stay here lent itself to some easy comparisons.
First, I'll assume that most aLoft hotels and W hotels are fairly uniform in approach and layout -- clever, modern, perched in busy nooks in main traffic areas of their given burg, clean and open with lots of corresponding natural light filtering through the windows. This one featured easy parking in the city lot below (though the rates claimed $20 a day I mostly paid about $6 for the time my car had been there), and this one was another one of those hotels whose lobby, in peculiar fashion, wasn't on the ground floor. At least with an aLoft, perhaps that's norm de rigeur.
You do miss some of the more luxurious touches you get at the W (this one doesn't come with a handy robe, for example), but in all the staff was upbeat and friendly, the room clean and comfortable and sleek, the atmosphere fun. I feel certain I'll be back again, when the adventure continues.
|