It started with New Yorker Hotel near the Javitz Convention Center. No wireless in the lobby. Bad phone lines so that the best I could get from my room to Earthlink was 24000 baud. No business center (they had one, but it was closed because "it is broken", according to the guest services staff). Conference rooms with inadequate sound systems. And the guest rooms were incredibly hot at night, leaving me with the option of opening the window and dealing with the street noise, turning on the window fan and dealing with the fan noise, or sweltering. I chose the latter.
Because I had a 7AM flight from JFK, my travel agent booked me into the Sheraton JFK Airport Hotel. No wireless in the lobby. Teeny rooms. I asked for a quiet room, which the desk person assured me I would get, but she gave me one that faced a busy overpass. There was no indication in the room how much local or 800-number phone calls were; it turns out that they are over $2 each. The shuttle driver had two speeds: too fast, and barely OK.
OK, so enough about hotels. American Airlines complains that not enough business people are flying. Maybe having wireless in their terminals in big airports like JFK would help; no such luck. Even worse, none of the payphones had data jacks (although oddly some had electrical plugs). The gate staff said "yeah, we hear requests like that all the time". Well, maybye "hear" is too strong a word.
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