Strictly from the standpoint of a tourist, the most expensive location in America has been New York City. There have recently been times when it was difficult to find a Manhattan hotel room for less than $400 per night.
But those days now seem over. All within the last year, two giant new budget hotels have added more than a total of 1,300 rooms—that’s right, 1,300 rooms—to the city’s Midtown inventory, and a smart visitor can use this sudden avalanche of cheap space to cut the cost of a New York stay to manageable levels.
The first such hotel, the Pod Times Square Hotel (400 W. 42d St.; 844/763-7668), is one of a chain, but by far the largest in it. With more than 600 rooms that are sometimes designed to occupy as few as 100 square feet, the Pod squeezes multiple rooms into what would normally be a single room in a standard hotel.
Yet with private bath, flat-screen TV, free Wi-Fi, and a bed fitting snugly into the tiny space (some rooms have twins, others have bunk beds one atop the other), the Pod furnishes all the essentials for unpretentious visitors in search of a night’s sleep but little else.
Prices at the Pod have been seen to be as little as $99 a night for such a double, although they usually range from $120 and more, a miraculous level for the Big Apple. Location? Two long avenue blocks west of Times Square, home of New York’s famous theatres.
The city’s other budget giant, the Moxy NYC Times Square (485 Seventh Ave., 212/967-6699), has been around for nearly a year now, is also 600-rooms-plus in size, has several smaller counterparts in New York and elsewhere, and is six short blocks south of Times Square.
Its rooms (pictured above) are a tad larger than the Pod’s and also tend to be a bit higher in price—say, $139 to $169 on many nights, occasionally higher. The mighty Marriott International is its owner, and brisk competition seems afoot between the Moxy and the Pod.
Don’t ever let it be said that there’s never good news for visitors to the Big Apple.