Priceline.com for Hotels

On our recent trip to Mall of America we decided to see what kind of a deal we could get on rooms around the mall. I have gotten rooms on priceline before. You need to plug in your credit card information, pick an area of the city you are going to, pick a star level for the hotel, and how much you are willing to pay for the room. It's a blind transaction. You don't know what hotel you are going to get, the computer picks one for you. We lucked out and got Sofitel. It's a hotel that is pretty swank, no pool, no shuttle to the mall, caters more to the business person, but it was great! The staff are very customer focused and could not have been nicer. They enjoyed having kids in the hotel and went out of their way to make us comfortable.

The one thing we loved the most was the early morning wake up calls. They bring a complimentary cup of coffee for every adult in the room 15 minutes after the wake up call. This was heaven! we did it every morning while we were there.

Steve got us all a margarita at the bar and brought it to our room one night. That was fun, we sat around and had a drink and visited while Noah and Olivia played with the buckets of legos that Uncle Isaac bought them.

The bathrooms had live bamboo in them, the rooms had art hanging on the wall, and Steve's favorite part was the settee in the corner, he spent the whole weekend sitting in it while we were there.

There is an area below the walkway that had a large bar, tables, 2 grand pianos, big enough to accommodate a huge party. I told Steve it would be great to have a wedding reception there. When leaving on Saturday morning to go to the Mall, there was a fair amount of activity down there with a huge amount of alcohol being brought in, etc. I told them we were going to come back to a huge party that night. Sure enough, it was hopping when we got back. There were people everywhere, both pianos were playing, people all over the place. When we shut the door to our room you could have heard a pin drop. We didn't hear a sound! At any time we were there we never heard another person in the hall, next door, etc. It was perfectly quiet.