This week I stayed at the Hilton Lafayette and Towers in Lafayette, LA. The hotel is quite familiar: I must have spent over 3 months in total nights there last year.

The corporate rate hotel rooms that I stay in have no refrigerator or microwave, even when I get the HHonors room upgrades. Two small bottles of water are provided free, but the large one will hit you for $4.00 if it ends up missing or empty. Fresh baked cookies often show up in the room for HHonors members. Hotel laundry service is prohibitively expensive: a cheaper trip to a laundry service keeps the bill under $60 a week. High speed internet access is available via ethernet, but they charge $10.00 a night. To make connectivity matters worse, it is possible to dial in over the phone, but the maximum speed is 21600, under half of the speed possible with good phone lines. I’ve found PBX systems can get in the way of a full dialup connection. All local phone calls are 50 cents. I can regularly get a King size bed, but the mattresses are in need of replacement.

The in-house restaurant is decent but expensive; I rarely go there unless the top floor lounge was closed and the front desk gave me a voucher for the buffet in the restaurant. Fitness facilities are adequate, with a TV, but the room is tight and can easily be overcrowded. Thankfully nobody was working on New Year’s fitness resolutions when I used the treadmill this week. This particular hotel has been around a long time, and this month it was undergoing a facelift in the lobby. Service is better than average; there is a person who always opens both sets of doors when one enters and leaves the lobby, and the staff is friendly and knows who’s paying them. The entrance is steep coming off of a busy street; most people who aren’t careful can scrape a car’s underside or their license plate. Lafayette traffic makes it hard to exit in the 7:30-8:30am and 4:30-5:30 traffic hours. The hotel has a good deal of convention traffic, and parking becomes heinous during large events.

Because I’m a Hilton HHonors Platinum member from my stays at this hotel, I can go up to the lounge on the top floor and get free continental breakfast. In the evenings the lounge opens up for two hot trays of hors d’oeuvres, two cheeses, and vegetables, usually florets of broccoli and cauliflower served with ranch dressing. At times the hot stuff is very good, when they serve taquitos for example, but sometimes they serve potato triangles flavored with cheese, a greasy fare that I have to skip. One could really eat on the cheap, a good deal if you’re on a per diem or a tight budget.

I’ve tried most hotel points programs (Marriott being a glaring exception), and HHonors has done the best by me. Hilton points are earned with dollars spent, 10 points per dollar, with the number of nights dictating program level. The good thing about it is the Points & Miles program, which has two options. One can earn both HHonors points and airline miles on most airlines, a situation that is good if you rack up a lot of stays, because the airline miles are per stay. The second (my option) is the Double Dip option, where you forgo the miles and get double HHonors points, a must if one has fewer but longer stays where more money is spent. There are a lot of Hilton brands, my favorite right now being the Hilton Garden Inns. They are relatively inexpensive, tend to provide free high-speed access, and tend to be newer hotels. The best things about newer hotels are newer exercise equipment and newer beds. The HHonors program is the chief reason I stay here. The facilities are old and a little weak, but the service is good.


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