Macy's inflatable Hello Kitty.

It’s early November, a great time to scope out a hotel room with a view of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade – for next year.

Nearly a dozen midtown hotels are blessed with rooms that overlook New York’s 2011 parade of parades replete with floats, marching bands, balloons and Santa. But prime real estate – a room that plants you eye-to-eye with Snoopy, Spiderman and Kermit the Frog – gets snapped up months before the bands strike up. You can still get a room if you’re not too picky. But it will cost you.

Parade-view rooms are sold out at the Marriott Marquis, the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers and the Manhattan in Times Square (a special parade coordinator oversees reservations at the latter two properties). (more…)

Times Square as seen from R Lounge.

This is what Times Square looks like from a window table at R Lounge, the Renaissance New York’s second-floor restaurant and bar with the flashy address – Two Times Square. Talk about the thick of things.

It’s one of those wow-I’m-in-New York! views, up there with the dining room at Helmsley Park Lane (Central Park), the roof bars at the Kimberly (Chrysler Building), the Bentley (East River), the James (lower Manhattan) and the Gansevoort Meatpacking District (Hudson River) and the revolving roof restaurant at the Marriott Marquis (the entire city).

And miraculously, when we stopped by mid-afternoon this week we had the room all to outselves, save for a woman with a broken leg seated by a window.  “Sit anywhere you like,” said the greeter. (more…)