Hotel Thirty Thirty New York City - July 2004

We stayed at Hotel Thirty Thirty in New York City 6 nights in July 2004. When we first started searching for a hotel in New York we were of course overwhelmed by the number of hotels we could choose from. Our goal was to find a clean, decent hotel located centrally in Manhattan and we wanted to room to be as cheap as possible and we wanted a private bath and a TV. After searching for quite a bit and looking into the option of using priceline.com we ended up on Hotel Thirty Thirty. We booked it through a travel agency here in Norway and we had to pay about 6400 Norwegian Kroner for the 6 nights (with today’s exchange rate that is about 150 dollars pr night including all taxes). I also used tripadvisor.com which is an excellent site where you can get feedback about most hotels in the US and around the world.

We arrived in New York City at Penn Station and we took a cab to the hotel. The hotel is located on 30 East 30th street near Park Avenue (only a few minutes walk from Empire State Building). The taxi only took 5 minutes to get there and we paid about 5 dollars. The lobby of the hotel was nice and quiet and the check in was extremely fast. I just had to sign a paper and they swiped my credit card and then we got a non-smoking room on the 11th floor (1141 to be precise). Our room was quite small but nice. As you can see from the pictures there room was pretty naked. There were a carpet on the floor and the walls were covered with a light wall paper.Apart from the king-size bed we had a chair, a TV that was mounted on the wall in corner of the room, a couple of draws and a wardrobe with about 5 hangers. The TV had lots and lots of channels to offer but I felt like it was like the Bruce Springsteen song “Fifty-seven channels and nothin' on” :-) One strange thing about the room was that the sink was in the bedroom itself and not in the bathroom. I’m not sure why it has been done like this but we got used to it :-) There was also a telephone and an alarm clock on the night tables next to the bed.

The bathroom was also quite tiny but big enough to room the toilet and a shower. The bathroom was covered with tiles on both the floor and the wall. The shower was a step in type with a glass door. In the shower we found little bottles of shampoo, conditioner and in the room itself we found little bars of soap and moisturizing cream. Our window faced towards 29th Street and the view from our room was not great to say the least. We looked right out on a typical New York landmark I guess…a water tank :-) But at least we were high up so we didn’t have any problem with noise from the traffic on Park Avenue at night.

Location
In our opinion the hotel has a pretty good location. It only takes a few seconds to get to places where you can have breakfast. We ended up having breakfast on Suzi’s kitchen quite a lot but there were also a Starbuck’s coffee right around the corner and a Pax place near by. There is also a restaurant connected to the hotel (Zana’s) but I can’t really comment on it because we never ate there. The hotel was also pretty good located when it comes to getting around. It only took us 2-3 minutes to walk to the 28th Street/Park Avenue subway station…and once you are on the subway you can reach most places in New York. We like to walk and on our first afternoon we walked to Empire State Building and after that up to Times Square.

Apart from this there is not that much more to say about the hotel. They have a laundry service, there are an internet option in the lobby (we didn’t try it out but we used The Log-on Café across the street from the hotel), and you can borrow an iron in the lobby if you need one.

Conclusion
I see that there are many different opinions about this hotel on places like Tripadvisor.com. We felt that we got what we expected and I think that the information on the hotel’s website www.thirtythirty-nyc.com is pretty accurate. We got a small, clean room in a hotel that didn’t have much more to offer than a pretty good location. But when we are on a big city holiday we are not really looking for a hotel with lots of amenities. After all most of the day and evening is spent sight-seeing anyway. I would not mind staying there again if we go to New York City in the future and I would not hestitate to recommend this hotel to other people.