Chile - Peru 2009

This doesn't look like Santiago, Chile! We are spending the day in and around the Wyndham Miami Airport Hotel. We really felt lucky that we drew the Wyndham because it is just off the Airport and is a higher level hotel than the other hotels we could have drawn in this random lottery. With the higher quality comes a problem that has always bugged me about the "better" hotels... everything costs a lot more.

Let's start with Internet access. The "better" hotels charge for Internet access, in this hotel it is $9.95 a day. The "lesser" hotels generally provide free access. This has never made sense to me. I decided that since I had my Blackberry, which provides me with e-mail and Internet access, I would not pay for the hotel connection. When we travel for long periods of time, I use my Blackberry as my access to the Internet. The monthly charge for that service is such that a few days use of hotel/campground fee based access is higher.

American Airlines gave us food two $20 dinner, one $20 lunch and one $10 breakfast vouchers. Each of these was supposed to feed two people. Since we are essentially stuck in the Wyndham, we have to eat our meals here. When we went down for breakfast we found out how inadequate these vouchers are in this hotel. If we ate off the a la carte menu, a cup of coffee was $2.95 (if you wanted milk instead of half and half it costs an additional $2.95). The waiter told us we would get more if we took the buffet for $15 each so we combined a dinner and breakfast voucher to cover the cost. He neglected to tell us that it would only get us the continental breakfast and as we stood in the hot line we learned that would be $21 each (they waived the extra charge). The lunch buffet is $20 per person but we managed to each get a meal. Dinner was a quick sandwich at the airport which came out to to just 12 cents less than the voucher.

Our departure for Santiago was actually 10 minutes ahead of schedule and we will likely arrive in Santiago about 20 minutes early.