A search for cheap hotels yielded many hotels with very bad customer reviews, so I wasn’t expecting much when I read the reviews for Clarion, especially when I saw it was located in Jamaica. Much to my surprise, the average rating for the hotel was 4.

I called Clarion and asked how much a room with a double bed was for one night and they said $114.00. The girl told me check-in time was 3pm. I asked her if I could come at 10am and she said that was fine.

So..Saturday morning, my boyfriend, our baby and I headed to Jamaica, Queens to the Clarion Hotel. When we arrived, we were greeted and checked in by the people at the front desk who were very nice and helpful. After getting our room key, we headed up to check out the room.

The room was a little cramped and we had a hard time manuevering the babies stroller around (we ended up having to leave it in front of the door, which made entering and exiting the room a bit of a hassle.) After checking to make sure there were no bedbugs/used condoms/heroin needles lurking in our new domicile, I plopped down on the bed, which despite the ragged looking comforter, was super-comfy. Next, I turned my attention to the tv, which was a wall mounted flat screen tv..nice. The channel selection was ok, lots of ESPN and HBO channels along with the regular networks and Oxygen thrown in for the women.

The room had a lot of nice little touches: free wi-fi, an MP3-ready alarm clock, Neutrogena bath products, lots of plush pillows on each bed, and most importantly, the room was immaculately clean. For the price, I was impressed.

My only complaints about the Clarion Hotel is that our room was right across from the soda machine and ice dispenser, so we were periodically disturbed by the sound of ice clacking into a bucket or a soda being dispensed. This normally wouldn’t be a problem, but our baby gets really fussy at night and everytime she was almost asleep, someone would come by and buy a soda or get some ice and the sound would wake her back up again.

My other complaint is that the curtains in our room consisted of very sheer panels which could be pulled shut and thick striped outer panels which were for decoration and not utility and could not be closed. The window is right next to the bed and right outside the window is someone’s apartment. Everytime we looked out the window we could see the people in the apartment looking at us. It waskind of creepy.

Besides those two issues, I really enjoyed my stay at the Clariosn and I would not hesitate to stay there again.

Rating: 10