Usually I have no problem staying at Holiday Inns, though staying at an airport Holiday Inn right after getting off a Qantas first class Airbus 380 flight (and paying $220 for the privilege, no less), sucks. Why did I stay at the airport instead of the city? Well, it was the last weekend of May,…
Continue reading: Four Continents and 37,000 Miles in Two Weeks: Holiday Inn Sydney Airport
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The credit-card fee thing? That is typical Australia. They charge it near everywhere! Just one of the reasons the country is not on my radar to visit again anytime soon...
Why didn't you stay at Crowne Plaza Coogee? It's right by the beach and is a heck of a lot more interesting than the airport area.
@Brian, that and the price of everything is sky high...
Hell the fare from SYD to the city makes the BART system in SFO seem like a hell of a deal 😛
200 MB is a lot of data as long as you are not watching videos online or sending a large number of photos. If you are only doing email or basic web surfing it would be virtually impossible to use that amount in a day (or even several days).
With my iphone I never get close to the 200 MB limit since I don't do any video stuff over the network.
As a Sydney resident, I can vouch for the fact that all ICH properties in Australia are overpriced compared to elsewhere in the world, and in fact pretty much all hotels in Sydney are going to be more expensive than you'd expect, especially for overseas travellers and given the extra-strong Aussie Dollar at the minute. One reason why I'm on mission to earn as many PC points as possible, so I can redeem them instead of spending hard-earned $$.
The room didn't look that bad though.
As others have noted, the credit card fee is standard and your rate wasn't bad for Sydney, especially given the weak U.S. dollar.
I just can't understand why people want to travel such a long distance to essentially see San Diego at triple the price. I know it is a tough award to get from the U.S. and that has always baffled me.
In the past few years, Australia implemented a credit card fee on transactions. Given that you already pay a FOREX fee, an additional fee is rubbish.
@ Jonathan -- The thought hadn't crossed my mind. I figured it would be easier to stay close to the airport and go into the city, as opposed to trekking both ways straight from my flight with luggage. Given that I had only about 18 hours, I didn't want to go too far away.
What was the pricing like for the Holiday Inn at Potts Point? That hotel usually has quite reasonable rates. In regards to the CC thing, it has begun to crop up, although I do believe the RBA is beginning to look at this to make sure companies are only recouping the actual costs of the transaction and not profiting.
@Carl Why go to China when you can got to Chinatown in San Fran right? Awesome attitude.
@Alex - I think the @Carl comment is more about style of travel then attitude. Some of us prefer destinations that are more "exotic" thus making us feel like the time and money we are spending is more worthwhile.
Australia is a lovely place but I won't be going back anytime soon as it's too much like home for me.......except, of course, on a mileage run!!
@Carl, I've been to San Diego, as have many others. As for Sydney, I seem to have 'bragging rights' here in the NY Metro area.
@Coins, why didn't you make your last stay in Tampa, or some other 'cheaper' location?
@ Dan -- Because I didn't have the time. It needed to be a Saturday night stay, and I was traveling almost every Saturday in May.
@ Ian -- The Holiday Inn was $220, not Qantas first class. Sorry!
Bandwidth is very expensive in Australia. There is simply a limited amount of connectivity (in the form of undersea cables) to the country. Metering by the megabyte or gigabyte is pretty common.
A digital camera which takes high resolution photos (e.g. my 12MP Canon) uses 4-5MB per photo. So in practicla terms if you emailed or uploaded 40 - 50 photos you took without resizing/compressing them, you'd use up the 200MB quota.
On the flipside, your average email is probably <20KB, so thats about 10,000 emails downloaded at that size.
Wow, is that Holiday Inn rebranded ? Looks pretty bad shape with the furnishings and the bathroom except the falt screen TV. Many of the Holiday Inn in the US after they rebranded, it looks like hilton.