Tomatico loved his first squash tournament at the tail end of the Tampa trip and wanted to do another one. We had signed him up for one the following week in Manhattan. We figured this was another opportunity to visit my wife’s family and also get some tourist time in the city.
Hotel Booking
While the tournament was held over two days, Tomatico would only be playing one of the days, either Saturday or Sunday. We wouldn’t know until they released the draw two days before the tournament so I held off booking a hotel. If he played on Saturday we’d likely stay Friday and Saturday nights, but if he only played on Sunday we’d drive down Saturday morning and only stay Saturday night, hoping for a late checkout on Sunday while he played his matches.
I scouted out hotel locations for Marriott and Hyatt. We wanted to use points or free night certificates to save money. Looking at Marriott properties, there weren’t any that we could use our free night certificate for that were located near the the Empire State Building where the tournament was being held. We wanted to be able to go back to the hotel between matches because COVID rules wouldn’t allow us to stay at the venue if we weren’t playing.
Hyatt had two hotels in the area. One was a higher end Andaz branded hotel and the other was a Hyatt Place. Both were only a couple blocks from the tournament. The Andaz was 25,000 points per night and the Hyatt Place was 20,000. Both are a lot of points but we had them and the cash rates were higher than we wanted to pay. While the Andaz was nicer, we would have to book a suite in order to fit all four of us which raised the price to 40,000 points per night. It made more sense to go with the Hyatt Place since it had two queen beds rather than a king and a sofa bed. We didn’t want Tomatico waking up sore for his tournament.
As a Hyatt Globalist booking using points, parking is included. For the Hyatt Place that was worth more than $50/night, so that made the 20,000 points/night easier to swallow.
When I got the tournament draw, we found that Tomatico was playing on Sunday so I only booked the Saturday night. We’d plan to go down early Sunday morning and it would give Tomatico time to get one last practice session in at our home gym Friday night.
Since we were driving, we didn’t have any other reservations or arrangements to make so we were ready!
Tomatico Travels 
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