IHG Army Hotels at Fort Hamilton

Friendly staff and our room was clean. Commissary is next door so you can walk over and grab food to make in the room. Neighborhood outside the gate is pretty safe and there’s a nice park.

Clean, modern rooms with mini fridge, microwave, wifi, flat screen tv. Breakfast is great: hot biscuits, eggs stuffed with cheese & peppers, sausage patties, turkey sausage patties, hot cinnamon buns, toast/​bagels/​muffins, cereals, oatmeal, several yogurt choices — even Greek! Fresh fruit (whole apples, oranges, bananas). Coffee, tea, free newspapers and a computer/​printer in lobby. No fitness center in the building. Meals and snacks for your room are available ²⁴⁄₇ for purchase in the lobby. We are here on a weeknight, there are free turkey and ham sandwiches and cookies in the dining area tonight for all guests.

What’s not to like? I think this place is a solid 3. Room was very very clean and comfortable.
No wifi in rooms. Ethernet internet was free though. There is an shuttle to the subway that will you to R line and rest of NYC.
It’s a straightforward type of place when you need a good nights sleep.
If you are a breakfast snob, venture into town unless you like cereal. The pastries in the morning could be better but again I don’t think they claim more than this.

These guys have come through for me so many times over the years. But now that they are under private contractor IHG, the rate has just about doubled… I was hoping that maybe the active duty folks were reaping some serious benefits from the takeover, like maybe keeping their rates the same — but, no. It’s in the neighborhood of $ 150 a night for the same room at Fort Hamilton that I used to pay $ 78 for.
(Now yes, I know rooms in New York go for $ 200, but just because the market charges that much is no reason why you should charge a soldier that much, especially junior enlisted on active duty. And I would be happy to have that debate with anyone. And furthermore — as my dad used to say — I think I speak for most military retirees when I say we would be more than willing to pay a higher rate if we knew that a young private would get a better deal.)
Sorry if this review sounds like a lot of inside baseball, but these are your tax dollars that we’re talking about, too. I read their brochure about how many new units they are planning to bring online, and so on. But a lot of these buildings have already been built. For example, the «new» lodging at Ft Hamilton took years to get approved and then even more years to get finished. But it IS finished. And throughout that time, several of the staff members stayed on hand, working in all the temporary locations they set up while this building was being built. So it’s not like the contractor had to find a whole new crew.
They say benefits under the contractor are better than when they worked for the lodging agency under the Army. That’s cool; they should have good benefits. But I doubt that those bennies are coming out of that $ 150 room rate that soldiers now have to pay to stay in a building that was already up and running before the contractor came along. That would be too good to be true.
And I don’t think the contractor is settling for what’s left out of that either. I admit to being cynical about this, and I could be totally wrong. But you would be amazed at how many balance sheets depend on a government contract to make them worth the pieces of paper they are printed on.
These are your tax dollars at work.