Hotel planning

[Jeremy White]

Hi folks,

So, I've spent some time on the Hotel page that Mike Hearn has outlined:

http://www.booking.com/searchresults.html?from_as=1;city=-2554935&ssne=Z%C3%...

These are also interesting:
  http://directrooms.com/switzerland/maps/zurich-city-centre-maps.htm
  http://en.venere.com/hotels_zurich/

...and I realize that I'm stumped.

I would like to find a hotel that has the following qualities:

  1)  Is moderately priced, so everyone is willing to stay there.

  2)  Has Internet access

  3)  Is fairly close to Google's office

  4)  Has a bar that we can encourage everyone to gather
      at on Friday.

As far as I can tell, we're not going to get all of those things.

Specifically, price collides badly with being close to the
meeting site, at least as far as I can tell.

As a guideline, I was trying to get the price down below an
average of 150 CHF per night or so (1 CHF ~= .6 Euros, ~= .8 USD).

I was hoping that some native, or even just a native German speaker
would be willing to help out.  I'm willing to make phone calls and
to try to negotiate block rates, if someone would make a list of
likely hotels to try.

The things I can't figure out from my desk here in the US are as follows:

  1.  Is it a certainty that there are no cheap hotels in walking distance
      to the Google office?   I *think* so, but can't be sure.

  2.  I can find nice-ish hotels at a reasonable rate from here;
      but I can't tell how far they are from the Google campus in transit time.
      The nice address to address feature of the ZVV here:
        http://www.vbz.ch/vbz_opencms/opencms/vbz/english/ZVVtimetable/
      quickly overcomes my inept German abilities when I try to do
      address to address searches.

  3.  How to pick between hotels?  I can find tons of moderately priced,
      reasonably rated hotels, with internet even, using the web tools I have.
      But I don't know Zurich, and have no clue if the Neufeld is a dump,
      or if Goldenes Schwert has rats :-/.


Has anyone else looked into this and come to any conclusions?

Any native Zurichian or German speaker willing to work with me on this project?

Cheers,

Jeremy