Review: Doubletree Club Hotel, Boise ID

My husband and I stayed at the Doubletree Club Hotel in Boise, Idaho at the beginning of the month of October, 2006.  We found our hotel like most people do nowadays: online.  We searched the web for deals, starting at under $50/night, and found a lot of really seedy-looking places.  I was suprised and a little disappointed: I'd assumed Boise would be an inexpensive place to visit.  I'm not sure why.  Sure, it's cheap compared to places like New York and San Francisco, but I live in Northern Nevada, where the local casinos are always advertising something like "Stay-and-Play Packages - starting at just $49/night!"  Sure, you may have to book your "stay" on a Wednesday, pay an extra $25 for parking, sleep in a janitor's closet on a rollaway mattress, and steal your "continental" breakfast from someone else's room service cart as it rolls past, but it's only $49/night!  (Well, "starting at...").  Regardless of the actual quality of this super-cheap "Stay-and-Play" package, Nevada locals are typically used to seeing these discount rates advertised all around us, and we start to think that's the going rate for hotels wherever we go.

It's worth mentioning that our trip was neither business nor pleasure: we were visiting family.  We'd planned to visit in the late fall and wanted to give ourselves lots of time to book a room in advance, hoping that would save us some money.  But there never seems to be such a thing as "planning" or "advance notice" when it comes to family.  In the first week of October, we discovered that no other dates in the rest of that month or the following one would work out for us or the relatives we were visiting.  We suddenly had to go that weekend - we had less than three days' notice.  Grudgingly, my husband and I went online to check hotel rates.  I was positive that we were going to get totally screwed.