Difference between revisions of "Hyatt Regency Cambridge"

Revision as of 13:20, 30 January 2007

The Hyatt Regency Cambridge, at 575 Memorial Drive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was host to Gaylaxicon in 2005 and Arisia in 2007. Arisia will be returning in at least 2008, and is pencilled in for 2009 and 2010.

The hotel is built around a central atrium, and is pyramid-shaped.

Function Space

About 30,000 square feet of function space, including a 3-season function tent, are found on floors 1, 2, 10, 14, and 16.

Two function rooms, Empress and Media Room, have hard keys, and the rest are cardkeys. Since it is the only thing on the 16th floor, Charles View can also be secured by locking off the elevators from that floor and securing the (hardkey) stairwell doors. Any room can be "rekeyed" for $50. This does not make the room strictly client access only, but it does guarantee that no previous customer has access, and limits hotel staff access somewhat.

The dimensions of the Presidents A and B ballrooms are incorrect on the Hyatt's web site. The airwall as built is 4 feet further west (into Presidents B), making Presidents A 39x37 and Presidents B 34x37. The drawings in Meeting Matrix, however, are correct.

The function rooms on the Patriots Corridor have curtains which are not quite blackout curtains, but are good enough to project video if you remove the limit screws that prevents them from obscuring the emergency exits.

Function rooms 203 and 204 have boardroom tables which can't be moved. Function room 201 has no boardroom table.

Opening and closing airwalls in Dawes and Paine can be done in 5 minutes between adjacent timeslots if the rooms are otherwise set theater facing in the same direction and there are no other set changes going on at the same time.

Audio-Visual

The hotel's A/V, including internet access in function rooms, is contracted out to Swank Audio/Visuals. Swank's director is Jesse Blanner. Their Sales Coordinator is Tim Donovan, 617-491-3724 (phone) 617-441-6513 (fax) 021hc@swankav.com (email).

Guest Rooms

469 guest rooms, including 10 suites, are found on floors 2-15 (there is no floor 13).

For the most part the rooms are very similar to each other, including the furniture. King rooms have the headboard on the wall nearest the hallway and two bedside tables; Double rooms have the headboards on the adjacent wall, away from the door to the room, and only one bedside table. typical guest room layout

Guest rooms 237 through 252 are behind an automatic swinging glass door which can be disabled to either manual or open; if it is held open the fixed glass pane next to it should be marked so that people do not walk into it.

Guest rooms 205, 213, 239, and 249 are Murphy Bed rooms. The Murphy beds are Queen sized and the Murphy armoire, which cannot be removed from the room, also has built-in side tables.

Guest rooms on the 2nd floor except room 202 have 10 foot ceilings instead of the usual 8.

Guest rooms x06 and suites x32 have balconies overlooking the atrium.

Rooms on the 12th floor are smoking, despite some documentation on the Hyatt corporate site otherwise.

Headboards in all the rooms are permanently attached to the wall. Apart from this, furniture in the rooms is easy to move, and Arisia's 2007-08 contract specifies that the charge for this is $25 if two weeks' notice is given. There are no overhead lights in the main area of any of the rooms; all light is from desk and bedside lamps.

The hotel has an account with Passkey. When setting up Passkey blocks note that Hyatt Corporate has admin level visibility into Passkey and will make telephone reservations in any available block regardless of the permissions on that block. This makes Master and VIP blocks useless; instead, make a bunch of reservations for the rooms you think you might need and transfer them as the details become available. Importing rooms from Passkey does not preserve the Passkey reservation number, so using that as a primary key in a rooming list will result in scrambling reservations made with the same name but different details. Also note that Passkey reservations without confirmed payment (usually a credit card) will not import into the hotel's runtime system.

The hotel's Front Desk manager is Zivorad Vasic (pronounced "zhee-lay vah-sitch"). Constanza Cortes in Reservations is their speaker-to-Passkey. Rebecca Howard at 617 492 1234 x4205 also works in Reservations.

The front desk cardkey system has a limit of 99 keys per room. In addition to autosequencing, cardkeys are also encoded with an expiration date, so those extending their stays sometimes have to rekey.

There is an automated checkin/checkout machine in the lobby. This machine cannot do split folios; these have to be brought to the front desk.

Elevators

There are six elevators: four passenger and two service. All have recently been uprated, except that as of January 2007, work on one of the passenger elevators is not complete.

Elevators 1-4 are identical high speed traction glass passenger elevators with capacity of 3000 lbs, 8'0" elevator door height, 8'5" inside ceiling height, and irregular shape. Note: the width given refers to elevator door width; inside cab width is about 5 inches wider. Doors are not centered on the cabs. Elevators 1-4 travel from floors 1 to 16.

Elevators 5 and 6 are service elevators, 55" deep by 80" wide, with 42" wide by 84" high centered elevator door. Elevator 5 travels from the basement to floor 14. Elevator 6 travels from the basement to floor 15.

Valet parking staff who have been pressed into temporary service as bellhops may not know the location of the service elevators, or they may not know the code to the door which blocks the most convenient access thereto. There are other unlocked paths to the service elevator, or the door in question can be propped open during peak checkout times.

Hotel staff can lock off floors and turn on and off call response. If a floor is locked off, elevators with call response enabled will still respond to calls from that floor.

There are also narrow escalators between 1 and 2, a narrow staircase from 2 to 3, and fire egress stairways at each extreme ends of the hotel. The stairways are unlocked but sometimes the door handles for reentry break and the doors then have to be propped. The east stairwell emerges at the end of the Patriots Hallway row of function rooms, but the west stairwell's first floor access is only to a remote outdoor area.

Restaurants and Concessions

The hotel operates a single restaurant, Zephyr, which ordinarily seats 150. Seating for an additional 25 can be brought in using Convention Services inventory. In summer there may also be outdoor seating. The offerings ordinarily include a buffet dinner from 5:30pm to 10pm and lite fare from 10pm to midnight. Turning from the buffet to lite fare sometimes causes hiccups in service. Zephyr accepts reservations both on paper and through OpenTable, though the hotel is willing to disable OpenTable for the duration of any sufficiently large convention.

The hotel's liquor license requres its bars, including portable bars, to be "clean and clear" by 2am, and closing is enforced nightly by Cambridge police. In practice this means that last call is at 1:30 in the fixed bar and 1:00 for portable bars.

Health Club

The hotel has a pool/health club located on top of the parking garage. The weight room is open 24 hours, but the pool, steamroom, sauna, and locker rooms are open only from 5am to 10pm unless 24-hour access is written into the contract (as it was for Arisia '07). If it is, access to non-hotel-guests is by cardkey available from the Front Desk. A maximum of 25 people are allowed in the pool at any one time.

Parking

The hotel parking garage has a clearance of 6'8" on upper floors and by some reports 7'9" on the ground floor. It is not nearly large enough, even if you arrange to the general public to be able to park in the reserved valet spots. The hotel is willing to help arrange overflow parking at MIT (including having MIT leave up the gate of the West Garage), but be careful to communicate clearly which MIT parking exactly has been arranged. There are approximately 250 free parking spots on Vassar St which may be available on weekend and which are probably the best bet for Dealer vehicles such as E350-based hi-cubes. There is limited room to park trucks on the loading dock. Arisia '07 got permission to park "two 15-foot or one 24-foot" truck in the space leading to the dock, starting Wednesday night and through the weekend.

Until recently, the hotel arranged employee parking at Modern Continental next door away from MIT during high traffic events. This arrangement has fallen through and future events will have to arrange alternate hotel employee parking.

Shuttle Bus

The hotel operates a minivan-based shuttle bus which ordinarily runs hourly from 7am to 7pm serving points in Cambridge and Boston, primarily Harvard Square. This shuttle bus does not take luggage and is intended for the amusement of guests rather than their arrival and departure.