NEW YORK -- All too often, visitors on business take only a small
bite out of the Big Apple when it comes to sampling the sites and
sounds of the city.
The airport, the hotel and the client's office can constitute
the essence of the New York experience for commercial travelers
either short on time or confounded by the sheer magnitude of
Manhattan's sprawling geography.
To help bring the big town into clearer perspective, however,
the Holiday Inn Wall Street District, a new property located at the
corner of Platt and Gold streets in the heart of the financial
district, is offering a number of packages designed to help
weekending business travelers -- and leisure guests, too, for that
matter -- take a busman's holiday on and around the island of
Manhattan by bus or boat.
The following is a sampling of the packages available:
Gilligan's Island. This plan, which costs $225 per room/per
night, features a two- or three-hour Spirit of New York cruise
around the southern tip of Manhattan. The outing starts and ends at
the sporty Chelsea Piers on West 23rd Street (at the Hudson River)
and takes in leisurely glimpses, some pretty distant, of the Empire
State Building, the World Trade Center, the Statue of Liberty,
Ellis Island, Battery Park, the Brooklyn Bridge and the South
Street Seaport.An enthusiastic and friendly wait staff provide the on-board
entertainment, which makes up in amplitude what it might lack in
professionalism. A "tropical" buffet lunch is included in the plan,
but drinks and tips are extra. A dinner cruise package, at $255 per
room/per night, also is available. Boarding for the afternoon
voyage is at 11:30 a.m., with departure at noon; the dinner cruise
boards at 7 p.m. and departs a half-hour later.
A2. So named for reasons that do not readily come to mind, the
A2 includes a sightseeing excursion of lower and midtown Manhattan
aboard one of New York Apple Tours' double-decker buses. The road
show, which comes with a fanciful live narration that seems more
designed to entertain than elucidate, is something of a
stop-and-start affair, with many landmarks dismissed in a cloud of
bus exhaust and many getting far more attention than they merit
(the apartment buildings whose tenants include Michael Jackson,
Cher, Woody Allen and Soon-Yi and Donald and Ivana Trump,
etc.).Other -- more traditional -- highlights include the Flatiron
Building, Union Square, Greenwich Village, SoHo, the World Trade
Center, the Lower East Side, the United Nations headquarters and
the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The A2 plan, which costs $195 per
room/per night, also comes with two tickets to the Museum for
African Art, a neatly designed two-level institution that bills
itself as the only showcase in the U.S. dedicated to African art
and culture.
Participants in the Holiday Inn Wall Street District package can
hop off the bus to visit the museum, which is located about a mile
north (uptown) of Canal Street at 593 Broadway, and rejoin the tour
when they are ready by hailing any passing New York Apple Tours
bus.
M&Ms. For the businessman or woman with kids in tow, this
package features visits to the Disney Store, FAO Schwarz or the
Warner Brothers store as well as tickets for two adults and two
children to the wonderful Museum of Natural History (and an
unlimited supply of M&Ms). The cost of the package is $295 per
night for a one-bedroom suite.Holiday Inn Wall Street District
Phone: (800) HOLIDAY
At a glance: Holiday Inn Wall Street
NEW YORK -- The Holiday Inn Wall Street, which had its soft
opening in in June and its official debut July 15, represents the
financial district's first new build in eight years.
In addition to the latest in creature comforts, the property
offers commercial travelers a number of accoutrements designed to
make working life on the road easier, swifter and more
productive.
Among the technological features the Wall Street Holiday Inn is
touting are T-1 Internet connectivity in each of the 17-story
hotel's 138 guestrooms, dual-line telephones and 900-megahertz
portable phones, automated check-in and checkout service, and a
24-hour self-service business center (with printers, laptop docking
stations and fax and photocopy machines).
Furnishings in the guest rooms include an eight-foot L-shaped
work desk (including such low-tech necessities as paper clips, an
eraser and a stapler), a work light, a safe, minibar, iron and
ironing board, CD player and TV, marble-floored baths, a coffee
maker and hair dryer.
And -- oh yes -- windows that actually open.