Old vs. New: Comparing Hotel Beds

THE HOTEL Grand Hyatt New York
THE EXPERIENCE Rolling out at Hyatt, Hyatt Regency, and Grand Hyatt properties, the Grand Bed does away with the customary raised frame and bed skirt in favor of a base that sits directly on the floor, lending the bed a more contemporary look. On this base is a pillow-top mattress and 250-thread-count cotton-polyester sheets, two of which are wrapped around a down-filled duvet. Frankly, I'd prefer a proper cover: by morning the sheets had slipped and my duvet was exposed—and how often do they clean that?My king-sized bed came with only three pillows, not counting the two decorative silk bolsters that I'd also rather not get too intimate with. (Fine, call me a germophobe.) Worst of all, one of the actual pillows had a visible smudge mark.

That aside, said pillows had the right heft, and the mattress proved firm and resilient. Apart from the stain, the bed looked good, framed by a sleek headboard and two handsome consoles I'd consider buying for home. Thanks to blackout curtains, the room was nice and dark—it was also quieter than you could expect any Manhattan hotel room to be. And I slept like a bear in January, registering a very good reading on the Actiwatch.
THE VERDICT Actiwatch Score 89.5 Lindberg Grade B

THE HOTEL Westin New York at Times Square
THE EXPERIENCE The Heavenly Bed was the first high-end bed to be installed at a non-luxury hotel chain, and its success delivered a wake-up call to the industry—or was it a sleeping pill?On my visit, I found the mattress to be terrific: firm, with a substantial pillow top, and set on a sturdy box spring and metal frame. The bedding, however, wasn't perfect. The sheets were perfectly good (200-thread-count and 100 percent cotton, better than at some of Westin's competitors), but the poly-filled duvet had a scratchy-feeling polyester cover. Swank as it looked—with vaguely shiny white-on-white stripes—it felt cheap to the touch, like a Naugahyde sofa.

Still, there's no denying that the Heavenly Bed is incredibly comfortable: my Actiwatch score was impressively high. I didn't wake up once—at least not until 7:43 a.m., when the couple in the next room let their door slam as loud as a thunderclap, jolting me out of bed in a panic. Suddenly, Crowne Plaza's spring-hinged doors sounded like a great idea.
THE VERDICT Actiwatch Score 91.9 Lindberg Grade A-

And the Winner Is...
Surprisingly, neither the Actiwatch data nor my own evaluations uncovered great disparity among the six tested beds. I say "surprisingly" because I wasn't sure the upstarts would get it right, and I definitely expected the luxury chains to throttle the lower-priced contenders. Considering both my own impressions and the Actiwatch scores (which, as at the Ritz-Carlton, occasionally contradicted each other), I found the field to be remarkably consistent, with no obvious losers. The clear winner, in this case, is you. If you're simply after a good night's sleep—and surveys show that is travelers' number-one priority—well, your bed is being made as we speak.

PETER JON LINDBERG is a T+L editor-at-large