We stayed here for two nights over New Year's. For the last several years we've been staying at the Howard Johnsons/Gateway at 9 North 9th Street, for our annual winter visit to relatives here, but this year it was closed.
We'd heard the Fairfield had a great breakfast buffet, so I'll lead with that.
The coffee was very good. The buffet had scrambled eggs, sausage patties, and paper-thin bacon. All quite good. There were three kinds of cold cereal, and one of my kids enjoyed what I guess was Froot Loops. They had three kinds of mini muffins. Next to the toaster there was wheat bread, plain bagels, and English muffins. The first pass through the rotating toaster was quite light, while the second pass was a bit burnt. I didn't want to change their settings, so I tried "snapping" the bread deep into the toaster with two fingers, giving it less toasting time. That worked great. For spreading on the toast they had butter, jam, and peanut butter. They had two cut fruit selections, both good, and whole oranges. One day, one of the fruit selections was all pineapple, which I enjoyed very much. For juice they had cranberry and apple. No orange. They had high quality, delicious Chobani Greek yogurt in blueberry and strawberry.
All was good except that on the second day, when I arrived minutes after opening time, it looked to me like the eggs were either yesterday's or overdone. Still good but not as great.
Compared to the breakfast buffet at the Howard Johnson's/Gateway, I'm not sure I'd rate it much higher. The Howard Johnson/Gateway consistently did their scrambled eggs absolutely perfectly. And their hash browns were always perfectly done though a bit bland. And their link sausages were quite good. They had orange juice but it seemed watered down.
So I'd rate the Fairfield's breakfast buffet a bit better than Howard Johnson's/Gateway, but not by much. If Fairfield did their eggs as beautifully well, and added excellent hash browns, and orange juice, then I'd call it 5-star.
Okay, that's a lot about their breakfast! Here's how the rest went:
They emailed us a link to check in remotely, but I didn't see how to do so with it. It wanted to sell me a new reservation. Gave up on it after a while.
When we went to check in and gave the very friendly desk clerk our reservation name, she too tried to sell me a new reservation! She seemed startled to learn that we had already paid.
One of the two cards she gave us didn't work, so I had to go back for new ones.
For a family of four, the double room was pretty tight; there were few good places to place suitcases and bags. Of the two chairs, one at the desk, the other was off in a corner squeezed tightly between the wall and a bed, far from the window. It was an odd, uninviting placement for a chair.
I sleep with a sleep apnea breathing machine. I usually sleep by a wall so I can place the machine on the floor with no risk of the kids stepping on it or kicking it. But here, there were not outlets there. I ended up with an aisle position as there were outlets in the base of the lamp between the beds. I put the machine on the table so it wouldn't get stepped on. We also had some devices recharging there, so we had quite a rat's nest of wires and tubes going on there. There was another outlet at the desk but that was fully utilized for recharging purposes too.
The bathroom plumbing and fan were quite loud. Otherwise the bathroom was fine. Lots room in the bathroom compared to the rest of the unit--so much so that one of the kids ended up using it as his hanging out space!
The beds were very comfortable; better than the Howard Johnson's/Gateway's weird hyper-bouncy beds.
The room had a good desk, television, refrigerator, microwave, and coffee maker.
They had placed us near a side door and had suggested parking by it. I did, and since it was not a busy time for them, I was able to park just a couple steps from the door. So when taking stuff back to the car at the end, I didn't bother wearing a coat since the car was so close. But trying to get back in, the card didn't work! It was about 10am, with a Noon checkout time. We tried my wife's card and it was no longer working either.
We went to the front desk. I told the desk clerk, a different person this time, that we were checking out, and that our cards had stopped working before checkout time. She replied that checkout time was Noon, as if that's what time it was. It was then about 10:30. I said that it wasn't working by about 10am.
Then she said the cards stop working if you put them next to a phone. Which I had. It would have been nice to know about that when the cards were issued. The paper sleeve they gave them to us in should have a big warning on them about that.
Then she handed me back the cards. It turned out she'd missed the part about us checking out, and had reset our cards!
For the low price, Fairfield was good and I recommend it. But if you can spend more, you can do better. read more