What was the problem with the Ramada, Dave?

On a related note: when Jared and I went to Canada last year, he wanted to stay in a nice four-star hotel and I wanted to stay in a B&B. So we compromised; B&B in Vancouver (which turned out to be a wonderful place), and four-star hotel in Victoria.

So we stayed at the Empress. Looks pretty from the outside, the location is good, the hotel is mediocre: tiny rooms, ugly interior decor, uncomfortable beds. Not bad, to be sure, but not worth the four-star-hotel prices.

Oh, you know — cramped, noisy, none too clean, broken pay-per-view showing nothing but bad porn, unable to locate a non-smoking room even though we'd made the reservation weeks in advance. The usual.

Cleanliness is a msjor problem in budget hotels. Particularly (a) dirty bathtubs and (b) greasy carpets.

I usually stay at the Hyatt in downtown Vancouver. Good location.

Scott, why stay in a hotel in Vancouver? The west end is full of wonderful B&Bs that (a) are cheaper than a good hotel, and (b) provide a more pleasant experience than most hotels.

Well, my motivation was to be in walking distance of stuff downtown. It may not have been a particularly good motivation; but since I find myself pathologically unable to get a handle on Vancouver's geography, it seemed like the safe thing to do. :)

I rather enjoyed staying at the Empress. Liked the ambience, place seemed clean, and felt centrally located. True, the room wasn't huge (unlike those incredibly wide hallways), but we weren't spending that much time in the room.

Having said that, B&Bs are nice if you're into interacting with a host asking 20 questions. Most days, on vacation, I'm not. All I want is a polite waiter who's willing to keep interaction to a professional level. Or, failing that, a grocery checkout clerk who doesn't see the need to make eye contact.

My experience with four-star hotels, particularly the older ones (or, shall we say, the ‘classic’ ones), is that their cheapest rooms invariably suck rocks — you're paying for the name and maybe the service, and not much else — but the mid-range and top-line rooms are better.

That said, there's no excuse for uncomfortable beds in a four-star hotel.

(I'm becoming a connoisseur of hotel beds. I'm getting old.)

Then we must've spent more, because our bed was fabulously comfortable.

(either that, or our standards are lower.)

We did the Entertainment Book/Half-Off thing to stay at the Palmer House in downtown Chicago a few years back. The location was wonderful, the lobby was breath-taking, and the room was, yep, small, cramped, and had water damage on the wallpaper. Bed was good, though, as I remember.

Maybe I have bad luck with hotels. The one I stayed at in Santa Monica last month pissed me off by not having rooms ready until 3pm; the one I stayed at the last time I overnighted in San Jose had a bathtub that was absolutely filthy.

By far the worst place i've ever stayed, though, was a nasty place in Gdansk. To enter the room you had to pass through the mens room; the room smelled of stale cigarette smoke; the sink in the room was coming off of the wall and had rusty water in the basin; there were cigarette burns in the bedding; and the size of the room was roughly the size of my office at work.

And it was snowing outside.