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...
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