I stayed here for 4 days on a business trip. In summary, the mid-town location of this hotel is convenient for both business and sight seeing, but the Buckingham lacks the requisite amenities required for me to recommend it to other business travelers. In fact, the longer I stayed here, the more frustrated I became, and the more I questioned the $300/night price, even for leisure travelers.

Other than location, the only other virtue of this hotel was the rather spacious rooms (by NYC standards). My room had a sitting area in addition to the bedroom – and was about 50% larger than rooms at the W, for example. However, the room amenities were lacking – The TV was not flat panel, and instead of a DVD player, it had a VHS player (been a while since I’ve seen one of those!) The room had a small kitchen, but I never used it – no one in NYC cooks so I would have allocated the space to the bathroom. Plus, the fridge was always running, creating even more noise for the room. And despite the kitchen, I didn’t find any minibar or snacks – something I would definitely expect.

I also had issue with the shower – not only was the spray hard and uncomfortable, the knob to turn the bath into a shower took a while to turn, meaning that by the time the shower started, I was still under it, causing a 3 seconds of extremely cold (and uncomfortable) water. This type of shower setup was what I’d expect in a 2 star motel, not here.

The room was pretty noisy (thanks to a loud air conditioning unit and the fridge – but at least no street noise), and there were no black-out curtains, so I woke up very early when the sun came out.

Perhaps by biggest issue with the hotel is that there was no in-room internet access (unless you wanted to leave a $300 down payment for a cable modem which I was doubtful would work). So, I had to schlep down to the lounge area, sit with a bunch of kids while CNN was on the TV, and check my email (and the wifi connection was very slow). Not exactly an ideal working environment.

The workout room was acceptable, with a variety of weights and towels, but no water. Another big deficiency in the hotel was the lack of a restaurant, bar or even morning coffee – I had to go across the street to Starbucks each morning. There is certainly no scene here at this hotel.

To top things off, and leaving me with a bad taste in my mouth, was that on the last night in the hotel, the alarm mysteriously went off at 7am. I didn’t set the alarm (it was on top of the TV, far from the bed) – so I’m not sure how it went off – perhaps the cleaning crew? Either way, it should not have happened and caused me to lose an hour of sleep. So think twice about this place, I know I will.