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Behind the Scenes of the Westin Boston Waterfront Opening

Where: 425 Summer Street [map], Boston, ma, United States, 02210

The Westin Boston Waterfront Hotel opened yesterday and you probably wouldn't know it but someone's already been sleeping in those rooms.

Managers for parent company Starwood have been testing out the hotel's 790 rooms for the past few weeks, making sure everything is working properly from the TV to the shower. The crew even gets to test all the dishes on the menu in the hotel restaurant, Sauciety.

"We're kind of the guinea pigs," said [Shawn] Black, who normally works as a senior manager at the St. Regis Resort in Fort Lauderdale and is among an elite group of Starwood executives who qualify to volunteer as ``pre-opening assistants," sleeping in a different room every night for the last two weeks of preparations.

Aside from checking the room amenities, there's hotel staff to be trained, fire alarms to be tested, room service to be ordered, and toilets to be sat on. In the past few weeks of testing, nothing seriously wrong has been reported (that Starwood would like to let us know about) except that the phones were in the wrong position in about half the rooms.

This brand new Westin, next to the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center is the city's biggest hotel to open since the Westin Copely Place opened in 1984. However, Marriott Copley Place with 1,147 rooms is still the biggest hotel in town.

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