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Tags: Hotel Renovations / Sheraton Hotels / Business Travel Hotels / Albuquerque Hotels / → All Tags

The Sheraton Albuquerque Uptown Gets a Tech-Savvy Upgrade

In keeping up with our ongoing series about Hotel Renovations, we've got word on the recent changes to the The Sheraton Albuquerque Uptown Hotel. The $20 million renovations were spent on redesigning the 295 guestrooms and suites and public spaces. The rooms were taken out of the mid-1990s and refreshed with a new millenium look with white sheets on the Sheraton Sweet Sleeper beds (no patchwork comforters here), 37-inch LCD TVs, and roomy work spaces with ergonomical desk chairs.

In fact, while we're on the topic of business travel hotels this place is the ideal hotel for a biz traveler in Albuquerque.

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Tags: Anti-View / New Mexico Hotels / Embassy Suites Hotels / → All Tags

Room With an Anti-View: Don't Look Outside the Embassy Suites Albuquerque

Where: 1000 Woodward Place [map], Albuquerque, NM, United States, 87102

You know the scene. You open the door to your brand new hotel room, run over to the window, open the blinds and bam, you are hit with the anti-view. Maybe you are looking down a dirty alley, witnessing a drug deal, staring at an air shaft in the face, or seeing a brick wall. Whatever you are viewing it is not extremely pleasurable. Help out your fellow hotel mavens by uploading your anti-views to the HotelChatter/Flickr photo pool, or by sending the photo along to us. Remember to tell us the name of the hotel and the room number with the not-so-easy-on-the-eyes view.

According to previous guest bk1bennett, the Embassy Suites Hotel in Albuquerque is a place that knows about its anti-view :

Because of the landscaping along the road, you can't see the slums from the car. I walked on the sidewalk and was amazed by the living arrangements. The hotel very cleverly constructed its grounds to keep this out of sight.

This is the view across the street from the hotel, but a lot of guests wouldn't even see it, which we suspect is a pretty good thing. The hotel website explains its location as being "in the heart of the downtown business district", which is, well, not that far away, judging by this photograph.

But despite all that, people like it. TripAdvisor reviews have calculated it the #2 hotel in Albuquerque, out of well over a hundred choices; although several did suggest the area was not the kind you'd want to walk through alone at night. Average room rates of $182 make it relatively reasonable but many suggest you should stay inside the hotel and forget the surroundings completely.

[Photo: bk1bennett]

Tags: Indoor Water Parks / → All Tags

Indoor Water Parks Migrate West

Where: 2500 CARLISLE BOULVARD NE [map], Albuquerque, NM, United States, 87110

Indoor water parks are no longer for the Midwestern family weekend getaways. Now, a hotel in Albuquerque is getting in on the action.

Even though you could probably swim outside in a real pool here, the owner of the Park Plaza Hotel & Conference Center has decided an indoor water park is just what the town needs.

True, the peeps of Albuquerque can't go surfing so the planned Surfrider feature of the water park might be a big draw, despite how much we detest these hotel-waterpark hybrids. Also included in the park rides are:

a 34-foot-high, 325-foot-long water tube ride; a 275-foot-long water slide; a lazy river feature that turns to rapids at night and a bucket that dumps 700 gallons of water onto eager patrons.

There's also fluorescent glow-in-the-dark water slides, music videos that will be projected on sheets of water and an arcade and pizza parlour. (How 80s!)

The cost of admission for the public would be $28 but for guests we assume its complimentary. And once the water park is completed the place will no longer be known as the Park Plaza. Instead, after $6 million in upgrades, the place will turn into the Radisson Resort & Waterpark expected to open in Fall 2007.

Is the St. Regis Resort and Action Funland not too far behind?

Related Stories:
· Hotel plans to add water park offering indoor surfing, slides [Albuquerque Tribune]
· Indoor Water Parks [HotelChatter]