New York City — almost a bargain.

Move over, Manhattan. The most expensive American city for travelers this summer is Honolulu.

This isn’t to say New York City is a bargain; it comes in number 2 in the third annual Tripadvisor Tripindex guide, which lists the 10 priciest and 10 cheapest US cities for travelers. Still, this is one index where first place isn’t coveted.

The 20 cities cited stack up based on the cost of a one-night stay in a four-star hotel, cocktails for two, a two-course dinner paired with a bottle of wine, and round-trip taxi transportation (two miles each way). Prices reflect summer hotel rates (June 1 – August 31, 2013). (more…)

At your service.

The news last week that the New York Hilton-Midtown plans to stop offering room service later this summer was a shocker.

Envisioning a big player like the 1,980-room Hilton without food-bearing, cart-pushing servers is, at first blush, like imagining a hotel without fresh towels or porters or doors that lock.

Room service has been a basic amenity since it was popularized by the Waldorf Hotel, the 1893 forebear of the Waldorf=Astoria.

I’m a fan. I can recall a litany of memorable room service deliveries from a romantic breakfast for two at the Four Seasons New York, complete with a rolling white-clothed table bearing lemon ricotta pancakes nestled in a warming cupboard, to the midnight coffee – in a silver pot next to an orchid in a bud vase – my jetlagged husband and I poured happily at Honolulu’s Royal Hawaiian. (more…)

The Excelsior Hotel.

You’re looking at a picture of the Excelsior Hotel on the Upper West Side. Is this the worst place to stay in New York City if you’re single?

It is according to a survey that asked singles to identify the top New York City hotels to be avoided by unattached men and women looking for a good time. The survey, which polled 2,312 singles, was conducted by Miss Travel.com, a year-old dating website that bills itself as the first – and, to date, only — social network devoted to travel dating. (Members browse profiles of other singles and set up trips together, with one of the parties footing the bill.)

The Excelsior easily nabbed first place, with 33 percent of the recipients voting it the New York hotel fun-loving singles should steer clear of. Among the runners-up, the Hotel Pennsylvania got 20 percent of the vote, with 18 percent going to The Roosevelt, 15 percent for Vinci Avalon, 10 percent for the Hotel Elysee and 4 percent shared by unnamed Others. (more…)

The newly named New York Hilton-Midtown.

Is the hottest New York hotel amenity a new name?

Consider: In recent months Stay morphed into Night Times Square (never mind that the original Night Hotel is just two blocks away). And the Sheraton New York Hotel & Tower changed its name to Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel (never mind that it’s not all that close to Times Square).

This week comes the news that the Hilton New York is now the New York Hilton-Midtown.

The new moniker marks a return to the name founder Conrad Hilton bestowed on his fledgling property in 1963 – New York Hilton Rockefeller Center, according to hotel general manager Mark Lauer. Only it’s not quite  because Rockefeller Center and Midtown, while close, aren’t precisely synonymous. (more…)

Steps from the Helly Nahamad Gallery.

It’s no mystery why hotels want shops on their properties almost as much as restaurants and bars.

The best keep guests entertained (and on the premises), attract additional visitors (who may migrate to the restaurant or bar) and impart a patina of prestige to the property, not to mention forking over rent.

But things can go horribly wrong, as the Carlyle Hotel discovered today.

As reported in The New York Times, the Helly Nahmad Gallery, located in the luxurious Upper East Side hotel, was raided this morning by federal agents as part of an investigation into a gambling operation replete with high-stakes poker games, a Russian organized crime organization, Hollywood celebrities, Wall Street financiers and professional athletes. (more…)

Stay into Night.

Having two hotels two blocks apart from each other with same name sounds confusing. But that’s exactly what Vikram Chatwal and the folks at Wyndham Hotels did late last month. They turned Stay, a 2008 Times Square boutique with teeny rooms and a sprawling, love-to-party lobby, into Night Times Square. The original Night Hotel, also in Times Square, stands unchanged – a study in dark-as-night black and white — two blocks downtown on West 45 Street.  (more…)

Work-down call.

The hotel room telephone has a buggy whip quality to it. When was the last time you used it to check a flight, find out movie times or talk to someone outside the hotel?

But with a nod to National Sleep Awareness Week, March 3 to 10, one hotel has come up with a reason for guests to pick up the phone for something other than ordering room service or answering a wake-up call.

The Benjamin calls it the work-down call. Starting this week, road warriors can request a work-down call designed to remind them that it’s time to power down and get ready to sleep.  It’s the flip-side of a wake-up call. (more…)

It’s not your imagination. Hotel rates in New York City have gone up.

In fact, they’re third highest in the world – just behind Moscow (priciest for the ninth year) and Lagos. So says the newly released hotel survey from Hogg Robinson Group (HRG), which compared rates for 55 international cities. The New York average is $341.59 a night, up 4 percent from 2011. That uptick reflects confidence in the financial sector, a good thing until you have to swipe your credit card.

Rounding out the international Top Ten were Hong Kong, Zurich, Geneva, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Sydney and Stockholm. San Francisco, with the second highest hotel rates in the U.S., came in at 11.

Bargain hunters should consider vacationing in Edinburgh, Belfast or Hyderabad, which posted the lowest hotel rates in the group. (more…)

Before it was removed, as photographed by a Consumerist tipster.

We like Tripadvisor for the most part and use its reviews the way our daughter’s middle school French teacher computed quarterly grades – throw out the top and bottom scores and add up the rest.

Still, a recent post on The Consumerist (via Hotelchatter) gave us pause. It seems a budget hotel in Dallas put up a sign in the lobby offering to pay guests $3 to $5 “instantly” for a good review on Tripadvisor as well as Priceline, Hotels.com, Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia.

As bribes go, the Grand Dallas Hotel didn’t offer much (it’s relative, perhaps; their rooms start at $50 on Hotels.com). But it once again raises the validity question about reviews on popular crowd-sourced sites. (more…)

A last look at the old sign.

Anyone who has seen the movie Taxi Driver knows that Times Square wasn’t always a desirable location for a hotel. But that was a long time ago. Now even hotels that aren’t all that close to Times Square are adding the spot-where-the-New-Year’s-Eve-ball-drops to their name.

The latest Times Square pretender is the Sheraton New York Hotel, which today augmented its name to become the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel – even though the hotel is ten blocks north of the Times Square’s throbbing heart, where Broadway, Seventh Avenue and 42^nd Street meet.

At least you can see Times Square from the Sheraton.  The same cannot be said for the TRYP New York Times Square South, which is a lot closer to Madison Square Garden and Penn Station than Times Square. (more…)