Hotel, check. Flight, check. New York, here we come...

At long last, we've found our hotel.
S&P (the other "J" of JandJmeetNYC) and I have wasted countless hours on the clock looking for the optimum hotel balance of price, distance, livability, access and cleanliness. Believe it or not - the latter was the hardest to satisfy!

Those of you who know us likely also know that S&P has some issues in the germ department. Specifically, she has declared a jihad on dirt, particularly the type that lives in hotel bathrooms. We had contemplated staying in the Beekman Tower hotel, one with such a fancy website and art deco-era stylings - plus every room is a suite with kitchen - that I couldn't pass it up, but S&P's worry was that the added square footage of cupboards and potentially moist countertops would mean bugs, mould and cockroaches. I can just imagine her nuking the vermin in her dreams. Originally, she nixed the Beekman out of hand, back when it was one of the best rated hotels in our "under $200 CDN/Night" price range, but as we drew closer to the day, and fewer and fewer hotels had elevator access, private bathrooms, and a reasonable price with availability when we wanted to be there, I guess her heart softened to the idea of getting something with a kitchenette. We reconsidered the Beekman.

We compared a variety of hotels, all verging on or surpassing our nightly rate budget... and we had access to a wide variety of booking deals - expedia.ca, hotels.com/.ca, travel411, and a special booking service available through my employer. Of them all, it turned out that Expedia.ca had the best offers all round, and was the most overtly trustworthy.

[side note: we had a bit of a close call with a rather confusing website we had been looking at for our flights. S&P had been comparing rates on hotel/flight packages online, and one of the sites had shown an impossibly cheap rate for the hotel - confusingly called cheaptickets.ca. Go ahead and compare cheaptickets.com and cheaptickets.ca, and you'll see what we eventually found out: the .ca website was a poor knockoff of the .com company, and a scan through the web for BBB listings found that others had been fooled by the .ca company, apparently based out of india, a bulk liquidator of travel tickets known for selling at impossibly competitive rates then recouping the costs through misleading fees, "mistakes," and fraudulent transactions. Buyer beware - always check the background of the travel website you are using. if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.]

So for the last two weeks, S&P and I have been passing furtive emails and text messages back and forth to each other at work, trying to agree upon a place to lay our heads on our vacation. The "NO list":
- no shared bathrooms (as in, with strangers) - eliminating hostels and most cheaper hotels
- no super-small hotel rooms (famous in NYC, the "boutique" and traveller hotels tend to have impossibly small, railroad sleeper coach style rooms, with one "double bed" being equivalent to a child's twin size.
- no "walkups" - specifically precluded by my wheelchair - it's picky like that.
- nothing below 3 stars - Actually if I'd let her, S&P would have chosen 4 stars. In fact, maybe she did. The one we ended up with was 3.5 stars, so hopefully it will suit.
- no bugs, no dirt: this is harder to evaluate, but a report of bugs or dirt on TripAdvisor was enough to nix it.
- No nasty, uncooperative or dodgy staff: when I took the time to read the TripAdvisor ratings, I tended to rule out those with repeated reports of bad staff. In my book, even the worst of amenities can usually be fixed with good house staff - a recent terrible experience at the Hotel Metropolitan in Toronto has me convinced of this.

The YES list:
- in Manhattan proper
- Under $200CDN/night (incl fees)
- reasonably close to transportation
- private bathrooms
- double or queen bed
- must have a functional elevator
- S&P wanted it to have a gym, but I kept saying that we could just run around central park. we'll see!

I'm reluctant to post specifics on our trip on the very public interwebs, but we are staying at what looks like a reasonably nice Upper East Side hotel near Bloomingdales. It could be dangerous.