Hotel Review: Summerfield Suites, Denver Tech Center, Colorado

A delayed start to our Christmas trip due to London Heathrow's inability to cope with snow, but luckily the Summerfield Suites were flexible and let us change our dates.

One of the attractions of the place was the full-sized kitchen - we were able to cook a Christmas dinner in our room, which was great.

The Tech Center is pretty well-placed for Denver trips - fifteen minutes at most from the heart of Denver, a couple of minutes from Park Meadows and all that's on offer there.

The Suites has a small shop, views across to the mountains (ask for one, it's worth having), friendly staff and a guest laundry.

There's a hottub and pool, which people were still braving despite the freezing temperatures outside; breakfast is pretty good for a comp - wide range of hot and cold items; there's a sundowner evening meal some nights which is fine if you're a meat-eater.

The only downside is that the doors are little over-emphatic in their closing - we managed to get a passive-aggressive note from the elderly couple next door after our door slammed behind me while I was carrying two cups of coffee and a tray of eggs going in. Avoid this hotel if you're unable to cope with the odd piece of noise.

The sofas are big, and comfy - designed to be relaxed on rather than just a holding bay until you give up and go to bed like in some suites.

In short: loved this hotel, and will definitely use it again in future.

Hotel Review: Hilton Chicago O'Hare Airport

Arrival isn't great - you come through a strange underground path from the airport, picking your way past the buskers and panhandlers. Eventually, you'll find an uphill slope to struggle up, and an entrance way.

The entrance way seems incredibly insecure - no sign of any hotel staff there, which given it opens onto the warren of tunnels connecting ORD with outside isn't great; what makes it worse is the horrible signage. There's a bank of lifts, with a sign 'Check-in on Lobby Level" and another sign saying "LL". So this is Lobby Level, right?

Um, no - it turns out after you've walked the length of the floor that "LL" actually means Lower Level, Lobby Level is identified by an L. The sign inside the lift tells you this - but couldn't the sign outside the lift be a little clearer?

Once you're out the lift, you have to continue plodding past some sort of sub-souk area flogging geegaws and trinkets before you get to the check-in desk.

To the hotel's credit, check-in was fast (once we'd made it there) and friendly enough.

Inside, the hotel is in desperate need of a refit - there's parts of the floor where the carpet is lying over what feels like chipboard put down over a hole; the common area decoration is stuck in the brown and gold era of the 1970s. It's clean enough, but just tired.

The room itself was fine, comfy, and two complementary waters were welcome.

Trouble was, it was roasting hot. We fiddled with the thermostat (also appeared to be 1970s vintage) but couldn't get the room any cooler, so rang the desk. The desk were quite snitty, snapping that it was below 50F outside and so the hotel only had heat on - the system is so out-of-date apparently all rooms either get heat, or cooling, but can't have both. He suggested we'd be better off switching off the fan and then that we open the window. (Oddly, the hotel had decided it was so cold outside it needed to have the heat on, but wasn't thinking it was too cold to have the window open).

The window only opened full or not at all, and was knee-to-floor height, but anything was better than the cookie-bake heat otherwise. It did mean we only got fitful sleep as the sounds of the airport and roaring wind hammered in through the window all night, though.

Seriously: a 700 room hotel that expects *all* its guests to either want heat or cooling?

The location, though, is excellent - up early for the flight, but not as early as we'd have to have been if we'd been on another 'airport' hotel. Quick tip, though: don't go outdoors to get to the terminal, as the surfaces on the roads and pavements are dreadful; you'll find your trolley keeps getting wedged and tipping over.

In addition, they ding you for the cost of USA Today - you can say no at check in, but they don't tell you until you get your check-out summary. We paid 75cents for a paper on a day they weren't even publishing. A mean little trick.

Also mean: if you order in-room breakfast, you have to pay 18% as a "gratuity" (shouldn't the size of a gratuity - if any - be down to the customer? Otherwise it's a service charge); then there's a 4% admin fee, and then on top of that another $5 in-room dining fee. It's not clear what the in-room dining fee covers that the gratuity doesn't, or what the admin fee is and how that differs from an in-room dining fee. I don't mind the idea that you have to pay to have yo ur food brought to your room, but the idea of paying three times to have the food brought up seems a bit extreme. Have your breakfast once you're at the airport.

[cross-posted from Tripadvisor]

Hotel Review: Homewood Suites, Denver Tech Center

Duck-themed delights from the off with this hotel - a gorgeous welcome pack, including a personalised note with the expected weather for the week and some water and biscuits.

There was an ominous note as the hotel was sprinkled with warnings about thefts from the car parks of hotels in the area (something, oddly, we've not seen at other hotels in the area).

The food looked and smelled great - didn't eat much in the hotel as the delights of Denver were calling.

The tech centre is well-placed, up to a point - you're quickly on i25 and just moments away from E470 (so the airport is a breeze, if you're happy to pay for the road), and you have Park Meadows on your doorstep. If your doings are more deeply in Denver proper, it's you call if you want to pay more to stay closer into the city or add a fifteen minute trip to get to Downtown.

[Originally written for TripAdvisor]

Hotel Review: Doubletree ORD (Rosemont, Chicago)

To be fair to any and all airport hotels, most of your clientele are going to be folded up and grumpy by the time they arrive, and the threatening and unfriendly underpasses you have to scramble through - avoiding the fake taxi dudes, the panhandlers and buskers - to get to the shuttle at ORD aren't the fault of the hotel.

However, the printed literature for the hotel promised a shuttle every ten minutes. That has now been cut to an almost worse-than-useless two an hour (admittedly, the website now admits this). You're looking at a $20 taxi ride otherwise.

I know times are tough, but this cutting back of the shuttle just chips the value off the edge of the stay. Not only do you have to stand in the chill of the night waiting for twenty-five minutes for the drive to the hotel, but the courtesy bus is groaning and takes ages to load up and unload.

Almost an hour to get to the hotel doesn't really make it count as an airport hotel in any strict sense of the word.

At night, the drive to the Doubletree feels like you're being taken through the backstreets of a Soviet-era Russian bureaucatic city centre. Daylight makes it look less unwelcoming, so if you do stay here but arrive at night, you'll need to suspend your feelings that you're about to be dumped in a gulag.

The driver, naturally keen to get on, unloaded our bags into the road - which meant they were piled in front of a limo which still had its engine running. No sign of anyone offering to help with them. In the end, I wander into the hotel and duck into the concierge room to get a trolley. It's only as I'm coming out that someone appears - "d'you want a hand?" It's too late by now, though.

The check-in team were very good, but I was already frazzled and probably less gracious than I could have been when presented with a free cookie and free water - 4am start tomorrow, and between the wait for the shuttle and the fruitless wait for help with the bags we'd already burned through an hour we could have been sleeping.

The room was brilliant, comfy bed, lots of pillows, felt clean and bright. There was a view over the city from the end of the corridor - during the day it'd probably look glorious.

Early start, rushing for the shuttle, call for help with bags. Wait ten minutes. Nothing. Call down. "Oh, there's only one man on today, and he's very busy" - understandably, with only one shuttle every thirty minutes, everybody is going to want to go at the same time.

So, arrival and departure was a bit grotty, and the conveniences you really need in an airport hotel were flops. But the hotel itself and the staff who were at their post were excellent.

Previously, we'd stayed at the Sheraton Gateway at ORD; on balance, I think that one edges over the Doubletree - but wouldn't rule out a return.

[Written for, and submitted to Tripadvisor]

Chains changed: Zizzi reshape reshaped garlic bread

Having moaned about the apparent sleight-of-hand used by Zizzi in placing their garlic bread with cheese on a piece of wood and shrinking the size, it's good to report that (perhaps because they realised their customers aren't that stupid) they've gone back to giving a proper sized bread on top of the wood.

The new menu is now in place - not very much interesting in terms of new items, although if it's true that they've introduced calamari because of "popular demand", then someone's going to be happy. Not the squid, though.

Chains changed: TGI Fridays spring menu

Less enticing news from TGI Fridays, though. They've pared their standard menu down even further with the Spring iteration. There is a bowing to the inevitable, and the cheese planks have finally been admitted to the list of appetizers (who, really, would order four hand-sized slabs of baked mozzarella as a side? Unless they had their own defibrillator on hand?)

Sadly, though, two of the nicer appetizer options have vanished - onion scoops and, unforgivably, the spinach dip. Isn't spinach dip one of the chain's key products? In the US, you can buy it frozen to take home and make yourself feel over-cheesed in the luxury of your own armchair; how can it not be featured in the restaurant?

There's been a bit more fidgeting, too, with what has up until now been the San Francisco Burger - one of the few vegetarian options at TGI - turning into a sandwich. It doesn't make it any better, and its shuffling on the menu seems merely designed to try and stop people asking for different sauces upon it. But, lord, it needs something - even had mine not arrived charcoaled into oblivion, it would need something. The menu promises "a toasted bun", but clearly the half-arsed lobbing of the roll under a heatlamp is intended merely to try and disguise the staleness of the bread. It doesn't work, and attempting to lift the 'sandwich' merely results in the crackling of the bun like the arctic icecap during a particularly warm summer's morning.

Increasingly, the UK menu at TGI is looking like it's approached as an irritant which impinges on a mission of selling unconvincingly-coloured cocktails. Pity.

Chains changed: Chiquitos lunch menu

Interesting development over at Chiquitos: they've vastly expanded their lunchtime special menu. Up until now, if you chose the cheaper option, you were tied to a really, really slimmed down list of dishes. Now, though, they've moved about half the standard menu onto the options, including vegetable fajitas and the vegetable chili tacos.

Even better news: the chain seems to have shifted their attention away from making everything over-sweet, and the vegetable chili is edible again.

Chains changed: Zizzi prepare Spring 2009 menu

Dropped by Zizzi yesterday, and caught them in the shift from the Winter to Spring menus.

The most obvious sign of this was the brutalisation of the mighty garlic cheese bread with caramalised onion. Hitherto, this has arrived on a plate, the size of a pizza.

Yesterday - although the new menu hasn't even started yet - it came out on a rectangular piece of wood, ready cut and assembled in a pile. Now, there are two possible reasons for this.

One might be that Zizzi has decided it's an exciting and attractive new way of presenting the dish.

The other, would be that Zizzi have realised you might not notice that the pizza bread has shrunk in size, but not in price if it comes in a different shape.

Number two would be the winner.

They've also added rosemary to the recipe, which adds nothing in terms of flavour. Well, actually, it adds a lot in terms of flavour, but nothing that sits well with the onions.

The staff told us that the pizzas are going to be presented in this manner, too, when the new menu kicks in. I don't know what the cost of equipping the chain with these new wooden platters would be, but presumably the savings made by shrinking the portions will help pay for that?

Chains changed: Pizza Express

The Pizza Express in Milton Keynes mall is trialling the new spring menus - and... well, the news isn't great. The concept is "lighter", which means they've had to come up with a cute way of making the pizzas less calorific.

How have the done it?

By, erm, cutting out most of the centre of the pizza and dumping a salad in the middle of it. (And also making the pizza smaller in the first place.)

It's a pity, as the toppings sound great - asparagus and peppers, a really fresh-sounding margherita. But half your pizza replaced by lettuce? What sort of a half-assed concept is that?