Hotel critique: SF Marriott

I don't ordinarily bother to comment on the hotels in which I find myself, but the SF Marriott, where I stayed during IDF, did enough things right and enough wrong to warrant special recognition.

I'll start with the bad: It's a Pepsi-only hotel. Switch to Coke products or offer a choice, but never side with Pepsi alone. If you disagree with this opinion, well, you're wrong. Tough for you. It also failed to offer free WiFi everywhere; hotels should bite the bullet and start doing that.

The good, though, outweighs the bad. As much as I hated having to pay for Internet service, I liked that for three extra bucks they offered a premium, high-bandwidth version that really was faster. I had none of the usual hotel VPN problems. Connectivity was excellent--though via a cable.

Sitting below the box that held the cable was a second box that let you hook your notebook's VGA or composite video outputs to the HD LCD TV. With that feature, you could watch your own DVDs on the TV or use it as a large monitor. I'd brought a MacBook Pro and forgotten its dual-DVI-to-VGA converter cable, so I couldn't take advantage of this feature, but I love the concept.

The room itself offered three great features: truly black-out curtains, an AC system that seemed able to maintain a temperature, and a bathroom door that opened outward. That last is important if you want to shave in the shower. If the door opens inward, you often have to close it to be able to use the mirror over the sink to shave from the shower, but then the mirror fogs up, you cut yourself, and you look really stupid at your first meeting. Okay, maybe that's just me, but I liked the Marriott's setup.

Finally, the housekeeping staff never knocked, a key feature for those of us who want every second of sleep we can get.

If you're going to something at the Moscone, you could do a lot worse than this place.