Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
property and another. Rooms at the Desert Palms Hotel & Suites and Howard John-
son Hotel are both rated as three and a half stars ( ). In the supplemental numerical
ratings, the Desert Palms is rated an 82 and the Howard Johnson a 76. This means that
within the three-and-a-half-star category, the Desert Palms has slightly nicer rooms
than the Howard Johnson.
HOW THE HOTELS COMPARE
COST ESTIMATES ARE BASED
on the hotel's published rack rates for standard rooms.
Each “$” represents $50. Thus, a cost symbol of “$$$” means a room (or suite) at that
hotel will be about $150 a night (it may be less for weekdays or more on weekends).
We list a hit parade of the nicest rooms in town. We've focused strictly on
room quality and have excluded any consideration of location, services, recreation, or
amenities. In some instances, a one- or two-room suite can be had for the same price
or less than that of a hotel room.
If you used an earlier edition of this guide, you will notice that many of the rat-
ings and rankings have changed. In addition to the inclusion of new properties, these
changes are occasioned by such positive developments as guest room renovation or
improved maintenance and housekeeping. A failure to properly maintain guest rooms
or a lapse in housekeeping standards can negatively affect the ratings.
Finally, before you begin to shop for a hotel, take a hard look at this letter we
received from a couple in Hot Springs, Arkansas:
We canceled our room reservations to follow the advice in your book [and reserved
ahotelhighlyrankedbythe
Unofficial Guide
].Wewantedinexpensivebutcleanand
cheerful. We got inexpensive but dirty, grim, and depressing. I really felt disappoin-
ted in your advice and the room. It was the pits. That was the one real piece of in-
formation I needed from your book!
Needless to say, this letter was as unsettling to us as the bad room was to our
reader. Our integrity as travel journalists, after all, is based on the quality of the in-
formation we provide to our readers. Even with the best of intentions and the most
conscientious research, however, we cannot inspect every room in every hotel. What
we do, in statistical terms, is take a sample: we check out several rooms selected at
random in each hotel and base our ratings and rankings on those rooms. The inspec-
