The best thing about the hotel is it's location for high end shopping as it is attached to the Prudential Center and, in turn, Copley Square and within a 5 minute walk of Newbury St. Boston is not huge so it's within walking distance to most of the main attractions but not for the unfit as it is on the eastern periphery of the tourist areas. It's attached to the Hynes Convention Center and the transport links are excellent, it's on the green T line and is a stop for both the Duck and Trolley tours.
The hotel is huge so the check-in queue took an hour to process, not a great start. It's a city hotel so doesn't have great amenities and is very expensive for what you get. They have a Starbucks but it has limited food (cakes and muffins), less competition for their own restaurants I suppose. The restaurant is only open for breakfast but the bar serves food all day. The food itself was okay, my well done burger was a bit on the burnt side but not inedible and the breakfast buffet was a little short on quality for the price.
My room was in the supposedly newly refurbished north tower, it appeared clean but I had to move the desk (more on that later) and the thick dust was not recent! While it was a lot smaller than my colleagues rooms in the south tower it was more pleasantly decorated and the rain shower much appreciated. They have a great facility whereby you get $5 credit for their restaurants each day you forgo having your room cleaned. I collected $20 over 6 nights which pretty much paid for my lunch one day.
Wifi is free in the lobby but mostly too noisy to appreciate. They also have several computers you can use in the lobby but there is no privacy and the big screens could very easily be viewed by passers-by. As a conference attendee I had free wifi in my room but it was useless, frequently dropping out. My cabled internet didn't work either and after several fruitless support calls I pulled the (very heavy) desk out to investigate it myself and found four Ethernet cables tangled together with various power and TV cabling They'd obviously had the problem a while but hadn't bothered to investigate properly. Two seconds and it was all sorted for the next guest!
My final gripe was a very large contingent of Lithuanians who arrived on the Friday for the weekend. Their children were poorly supervised and ran rampant through the corridors into the early hours of my last two nights. Despite several guests complaints the situation did not improve and I left very tired and cranky.
Having said all that Boston is a great place to visit but I won't be choosing this Sheraton next time.
hotel reviews