Feb 7, 2008
The difficulty of finding affordable accommodations in New York has reached crisis proportions, and calls for innovative planning
A torrent of recent reports about average hotel room rates in New York City in 2007 has found that figure to be greater than $300 -- and sometimes as high as $340. Innocent visitors planning a stay in Gotham are in for the shock of their lives: the prospect of paying three times as much as they normally would.
To avoid paying $300 or $325 or $340 a night for a hotel room in New York, you need a cost-conscious guidebook, or you need to use alternative lodgings that aren't hotels. And can I be blunt about this? A guidebook that does a superb job in ferreting out a number of perfectly-acceptable, cheaper New York hotels is Pauline Frommer's New York. Pauline set out to write an intensely budget-oriented guidebook to New York and she labored long and hard to find such properties and then to assure herself that they were proper to use.
She also devoted more attention than has ever been devoted to alternative accommodations in New York: apartments, in particular; religious retreats; institutional lodgings of various sorts. And her chapter on accommodations is replete with suggestions on how you can enjoy a perfectly comfortable stay for prices nowhere near the average room rate that prevailed last year. In particular, she has described the several local apartment-rental firms that operate in New York and are perhaps your best bet for spacious, comfortable lodgings at an affordable price.
You can also, of course, survey the national apartment-rental organizations when you plan a trip to New York. I've written before about VRBO.com (www.vrbo.com), Rentalo (www.rentalo.com), HomeAway (www.homeaway.com), Zonder.com (www.zonder.com), EVrentals.com (www.evrentals.com), and others. Only recently, I went to Zonder.com and found a two-bedroom apartment in mid-town Manhattan renting for $139 a night. Now that hotel costs have spiraled so high, the internet is bursting with new services for bringing temporary apartment rentals to transient visitors.
But your best bet -- trust me -- is Pauline Frommer's New York.
Write and read comments about this post.
To avoid paying $300 or $325 or $340 a night for a hotel room in New York, you need a cost-conscious guidebook, or you need to use alternative lodgings that aren't hotels. And can I be blunt about this? A guidebook that does a superb job in ferreting out a number of perfectly-acceptable, cheaper New York hotels is Pauline Frommer's New York. Pauline set out to write an intensely budget-oriented guidebook to New York and she labored long and hard to find such properties and then to assure herself that they were proper to use.
She also devoted more attention than has ever been devoted to alternative accommodations in New York: apartments, in particular; religious retreats; institutional lodgings of various sorts. And her chapter on accommodations is replete with suggestions on how you can enjoy a perfectly comfortable stay for prices nowhere near the average room rate that prevailed last year. In particular, she has described the several local apartment-rental firms that operate in New York and are perhaps your best bet for spacious, comfortable lodgings at an affordable price.
You can also, of course, survey the national apartment-rental organizations when you plan a trip to New York. I've written before about VRBO.com (www.vrbo.com), Rentalo (www.rentalo.com), HomeAway (www.homeaway.com), Zonder.com (www.zonder.com), EVrentals.com (www.evrentals.com), and others. Only recently, I went to Zonder.com and found a two-bedroom apartment in mid-town Manhattan renting for $139 a night. Now that hotel costs have spiraled so high, the internet is bursting with new services for bringing temporary apartment rentals to transient visitors.
But your best bet -- trust me -- is Pauline Frommer's New York.
Write and read comments about this post.
Labels: accommodations, new york city
Fifty years ago, 
Arthur Frommer is generally acknowledged to be the nation's foremost travel authority. He is the founder of the
