For us, miles and points are a way to travel the way we want to. Sometimes that’s flying in business class to Japan and other times that’s staying in a luxury hotel in Austria. However, it also means having the ability to stay in exactly the hotel we want when we want to stay there. This review is about one of those latter type of hotel stays.
We’ve stayed in several hotels around Times Square and have our favorites. This hotel stay was different. Besides running this website, one of the things we like to do is sing. In fact, we were fortunate to get the chance to sing at Carnegie Hall in a show with a New York-based concert production company in February. After getting the schedule, we saw that the show rehearsals were being held at the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel. There were award nights available at the hotel for the days we needed, so I went and booked a five night stay for our trip. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed our stay and I’m adding it to our list of places we’d be willing to stay again.
Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel
811 7th Avenue 53rd Street
New York, NY 10019
The Sheraton Times Square is a massive hotel originally built in 1935. It has 1781 guest rooms and 60,000 square feet of meeting space. I think we had stayed there before but I can’t remember it that well. That may be because the hotel was recently renovated in 2013 and I remember it as a dingy place when we stayed there in the early 2000s.
PRICE
Reward nights at this hotel in low season cost 12,000 Starpoints per night. Fortunately, if you’re staying at anything over a category 3 hotel, your fifth night is free when booking with points. We decided to turn this trip into a vacation and booked five nights for 48,000 Starpoints. A quick search finds rooms at this hotel generally run between $250 and $350 a night (plus the $25 a night destination fee this hotel has started to charge which, fortunately, we booked before this took effect). This is the first ever Starwood hotel we booked using the fifth night free with points but it made the redemption even more valuable. If the room was $300 with New York taxes this stay would have cost $1921 for 5 nights. That means I was able to get 4 cents per Starpoint on this redemption. It’s easy to see why Starpoints are seen as some of the most valuable points currencies.
PICTURES
Remembering what I did about this hotel, I wasn’t expecting much. I was very surprised at how nice the lobby area looked
We went to the regular check in line because we booked the room with Sharon’s Starwood points*. It was a short wait before the check in agent was able to help us and we received an upgraded room after turning down the paid upgrade.
We were provided a room on the 37th floor, reserved for SPG guests. We were just a few rooms from the elevator.
The room was quite large for New York standards. We had a legitimately large king sized bed with a seating area by the window that looked over Times Square.
The room had a desk with plugs for a computer. The problem was if two people wanted to work in the room (Hello, from a two person blog) one of them had to work on the small (12″ x 18″) table and sit on the couch.
The bathroom had a shower/tub combo but it did pass the not blowing the curtain onto me while in the shower test.
As usual, Sharon was thrilled by the hotel soaps in our room.
There was a mini-bar in the room and I asked if they could empty it to prevent any charges. They said it wasn’t possible to do that but they could lock it so we wouldn’t be charged. I said that wasn’t necessary and I guess that was enough for us not to receive any unnecessary charges. They did have a Keurig in the room but there wasn’t any milk (and we couldn’t buy milk and put it in the mini-bar because then we’d undoubtedly get charged for moving something) so we needed to head out for coffee. Fortunately, we had access to the hotel lounge thanks to our SPG Business AMEX card and were able to get coffee in the mornings.
The only problem we had was the hotel staff didn’t mention at check in that we had lounge access, even though we used our SPG Business card to pay for the stay.
It took several Twitter messages to @SPGAssist to confirm we were eligible for access on a stay with points, and then we just needed to get the front desk to code our keys for lounge access. We had to show our SPG Business card (which should not be necessary) and this just proves you should always bring your card with you, just in case.
I can vouch that @SPGAssist is a wonderful tool to use with any question on a Starwood hotel stay.
* I mentioned above that we booked the hotel under Sharon’s account even though I’m an SPG Gold and she’s just a Preferred Guest Plus level member. That was because she’s the one with the SPG Business card and getting lounge access at this Sheraton was more important that any possible upgrade or elite benefit I could have received with my status.
FINAL THOUGHTS
What can I say about this hotel, other than it was the perfect place for us to stay. Our concert contact replied this when we told her we were staying at the Sheraton
Great! I’m glad you’ll be staying at the Sheraton. That’s good to hear!!
We were able to get the fifth night free since we used points for our stay. I’m not sure if I’d pay 12,000 Starpoints a night for a stay here but the combination of being the absolute perfect hotel for our needs and getting the fifth night free made it a dream redemption. If hotel prices are through the roof and nothing else is available for a reasonable price, I’d consider this a hotel we’d be willing to stay at again and I’m adding it to our list.
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