This resurrected a memory. Round about 1975-76, three friends and I went from San Diego to San Francisco for a long weekend. We happened to meet up with the parents of one of the guys in the group and they paid for our hotel for a couple of nights. My room was barely more than a closet - just space for a bed and maybe a chair? - and no window. No complaints from me - it was clean, quiet, and free.
However, now in my old age, the chances of someone’s parents doing the same for me is pretty much nil. And if I’m paying, I want a window - even if there’s not much of a view.
Not $250, but Marriott has multiple properties available this weekend in Manhattan in the $300s after fees and taxes. Same for some random calendar spot checks in September. While not the Ritz-Carleton, I’m pretty sure Fairfield, etc. all have windows.
FWIW since it’s often a ceiling for my clients, the GSA rate for NYC tops out at $286 (before taxes). I’m glad I don’t have to navigate that.
I’ve spent days working in hotel rooms. They all had windows but I wouldn’t have minded if there were none. As it was it was preferrable to working in a windowless office that used to be a supply closet in a hospital morgue and still would be without the windows.
I remembered another one. I stayed in a hotel room in Costa Rica where the room technically had a window, but the window looked out on an indoor atrium, not the actual outdoors.
In the first apartment I lived in in college the bedroom was a windowless interior room, but it did have a skylight. I’m guessing the building code at the time it was built required an allowance for natural light, but didn’t specifically require a window. I doubt that would meet fire codes today, but I’m guessing it was grandfathered.
Only once that I can remember. We were on vacation, and had reservations to stay a single night at a Best Western in Flagstaff, AZ – when we got there, we discovered that there had been a problem with our reservation, and they didn’t have a room for us.
But, the manager, in an effort to make it right, offered us a room that they usually used for when a staff member had to stay overnight. It had all of the features of a typical hotel room, except for a window.
As we were only in that room for a grand total of maybe 10 hours (most of them during nighttime), it was just fine.
Better than nothing. I had a doctor’s appointment a few days ago, and they stuck me in a windowless office and said the doctor would be about fifteen minutes. He was half an hour. After twenty minutes I got up and opened the door; the sight of the adjacent partially-naturally-lit room helped considerably.
