The Marriott Baltimore at Washington Airport: Not Bad for $48

Sometimes price makes all the difference in the world. Take the Marriott BWI for example. I'm going to do a lot of grumbling, but in the end go with 4 stars. Why? Because we got a deal on Priceline and when ya only pay $48 for a room with a posted amount of $359, you just gotta cut a little slack.

First off, I have to give the Marriott some major kudos for hiring Stephanie at the front desk. I mean this chick rawks hard. She has a genuine smile and honestly wants to make sure each and every guest is happy in her hotel. She went above and beyond for us. Check in and out with her was a pleasure. So much so that I asked to see her manager. Poor girl paled a bit since she knew a few things had gone wrong during our one night stay... but all I wanted to do was make sure her boss knew how great she was. Folks don't bother to offer praise where it counts often enough. I always try to.

The first of the problems arose when we got to our room, a smoking room (221). There were no ashtrays. We called down for some but they never did arrive. Mildly annoying. I mean I'm a terrible collector of touristy crap so I happened to have a Baltimore ashtray in my bag, but still...

Then my laptop failed to detect the hotel's wireless connection. They have it hidden and coded. weeeeee. A quick call to Stephanie solved that though. She personally brought us up a wireless adapter within like a minute. Amazing. It worked like a charm. While I'm on it, I might tell you that Internet access here is $9.95 per 24 hour period, running from noon to noon each day and includes unlimited phone calls... even long distance. Not bad at all. The connection was fairly fast too, for a hotel.

The room itself was all about forest green and cream, with a bit of mauve thrown in. Very tasteful use of the colors here. We had two double beds, which were more than adequate. The desk had a nesting table under it in case you needed more room. The lamp there had two outlets in it's base for plugging in laptop power cords, and a port to plug into if you didn't want to use the wireless, although that didn't work for me either.