Thursday, November 12, 2009

Radisson Boston - hotel review

October. Boston.


OK, you know the setting. My friend and I were trying to figure out where to stay in Boston. I'd never been before and so knew nothing about the city. I thought it might be nice to stay close to the Berklee Performance Center since we were going to see a show there. Well, it turns out that since it was kinda close to Fenway Park in the middle of the Boston Red Sox's pennant run, rooms were a bit difficult to find and fairly expensive to boot. We'd be sharing the room, so that halved the cost, but that didn't mean we wanted to pay the price of one regular room for just our share of the room.

We found a hotel that we thought might suit our needs, but then my friend ended up getting a really good deal at the Radisson Hotel Boston because of her membership.

The hotel has a parking structure, though the spaces themselves and the layout of the multi-floored structure were a bit odd. We arrived about mid-afternoon and drove around a bit before finding a space. There's an elevator in the structure that takes you down to the main floor, and then you have to enter other doors to get into the lobby of the hotel. At one point during our stay, when it was a bit later at night, we discovered that the doors from the parking elevator to the lobby were closed, so we had to go around to the valet parking entrance to get inside the lobby.

And there are stairs everywhere - coming in from the parking elevator, there's a couple steps down to get to the elevator area for the hotel itself, and then a few more steps to get to the main lobby area and then yet more steps to get to the reservation desks. Being from California where wheelchair accessibility is fairly common, it was a bit odd to encounter so many steps (which we noticed because we were pulling our rolling luggage) as that would not be wheelchair friendly at all, but then Boston is a much older city, and I expect this hotel has been around for a while.

The room itself was very nice, with two beds - I can't remember if they were doubles or queens. There was a little balcony area outside the room that we peeked at.



The view from the balcony. No, I have no idea what the view is of.




The view looking in a different direction. I'm not sure that the water from the harbor is readily visible in this picture. You could tell when looking out the window.



The room was clean and comfortable and suitable for our needs. The showerhead in the bathroom was extremely high up, so it was pretty much raining on me when I took a shower, but I find that a lot of hotels are set up that way. Too bad for us short people who don't prefer to be rained on.


The hotel ended up being fairly conveniently situated. We had a lovely dinner at Rustic Kitchen, which is pretty much right next door, across the covered driveway, and the hotel site even refers to Rustic Kitchen as on-site dining. Then just a couple blocks away, there's the lovely Finale. And the nearest subway entrance is only a couple blocks away as well, so that's convenient for travelling around Boston. We ended up taking a cab to Berklee, and that worked out just fine.

I will admit that I have no idea what the regular pricing is on the room, but I definitely would consider staying at the Radisson again on a future visit.

Thanks to Sherry for letting me share her room with her.




Radisson Hotel Boston
200 Stuart Street
Boston, MA 02116
1-800-395-7046
(617) 482-1800

1 comment:

Sherry said...

You're welcome! I'm glad that I remembered that I had a good deal coming to me. :)

The beds were queen-sized, Sleep Number beds. Comfy.