OffPeakTraveler.com is encouraging you to come to the Big Apple for those tourist-depleted months of January, February and March. The deal covers three nights (extendable to five nights) in a tourist-class hotel, tickets for a 2-hour Circle-Line Cruise, entrance to the New York City Fire Museum and all taxes. Airfare isn't included. OffPeakTraveler gives you a code for 15% off Midwest Express tickets, but the SideStep plug-in on my browser beat the pants off of any of the Midwest Express rates I was able to get in trying various dates and departure cities.
The Hotels
The best rate is available only for double occupancy at the Hotel Deauville, a tourist-class hotel in a refurbished brownstone in the Murray Hill/ Midtown East neighborhood of Manhattan. Trip insurance adds another $14-some per person to the tab. Depending on the date, you can upgrade to the superior-tourist-class Holiday Inn Chinatown or the Thirty Thirty Hotel for under $35 more per person. These three hotels are clean and have surprisingly attractive exteriors for their class, but the room interiors are unremarkable. The first class hotels--the Carlton, Marquis and Park South Hotels--were more finicky about dates, but were sometimes upgradeable by as little as $75 more per person.
All but one of the hotels are near the Empire State and Flatiron Buildings and offer easy access to Times Square, Museum Mile and Fifth Avenue shopping. For a less touristy New York neighborhood experience, go to the Holiday Inn Chinatown with easy access to SoHo, Tribeca and the restaurants of Little Italy.
The Cruise
The two-hour cruise starts and ends at Pier 83 at 42nd Street and carries a retail price tag of $20. Along the way you'll see the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges, the U.N. and the Lower Manhattan skyline. Honestly, the cold and lack of sun make winter the worst time to be on a boat in the New York harbor, but the ships are climate controlled, and it's tough to make the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge look bad. Also, if it stays clear and you time it right, you can see the sun setting over New York, a sight not to be missed.
The Museum
The New York City Fire Museum features exhibits on New York's biggest fires, fire fighting gear through the ages and all sorts of fire related paraphernalia. Basically OffPeakTraveler has covered the $4 suggested admission for you, which doesn't seem like much of a perk. This museum isn't going to make most people's list of top New York attractions, and unless you're a real fire fighting fanatic, you might want to save your limited time.
The Bottom Line
If you back out the $24 per person for the museum and the cruise, this offer allows you to book a reasonably nice hotel room in New York City for about $103 a night, and that includes taxes. That's nothing to sneeze at, but we're talking about the off-season here. If you can bear the Priceline.com suspense and risk, try bidding 20% below your room rate for a comparably rated hotel during your dates. Chances are you'll do pretty well. Find out more about the deal at www.OffPeakTraveler.com.
A Note to Readers: This is an Internet-only company, meaning your only choice is to contact them via their Web site. When we ran a piece originally on OffPeak Traveler on their great deals to London (deals, by the way, that forced Go-Today to match the lowest prices we've seen in years), we heard back from some of you about the slow turn-around time in getting a response from representatives of the company. Since then, we've received reassurances from Jay Sorenson, the vice president of marketing, that they've hired a many more staff to deal with the unexpected interest in their budget travel offers.
