Hilton Garden Inn Albany Airport, Albany

Given the price of the hotel, I was expecting a little bit more. I definitely wasn't expecting to have to rinse out the coffee mugs and water glasses before I felt comfortable using them. All of them had this funny lint-like junk stuck inside them. It wasn't really dirty, but it was still a bit gross. Other negatives: slow drain in the bathtub, no fan in the bathroom, no heat lamp in the bathroom. The location is great if you need to hop a plane. It's within walking distance of Albany International Airport. Unfortunately, it's not near much else except for a country club. It's three to five miles to the nearest restaurant that's not the hotel restaurant. I only had breakfast there and found the food to be acceptable, but like my impression of the hotel, it was too ordinary for the price. There are some very fun, interesting, and GREAT places to eat within a ten mile radius, but the problem for us was that the hotel staff that we talked to only seemed to be able to be able to identify mostly chain restaurants and the hotel information in our room wasn't very useful for discovering local secrets. We went off on our own and found some great places to eat. We did get a little lucky though. If you want a hotel that provides the illusion of a forested retreat (albeit a thin illusion), you may find this Hilton to your liking. The one thing it has going for it that none of the other area hotels that we saw is that it's not just a fancier version of a roadside inn within half a car-honk away from a big road. It's settled in a pocket of tall trees that serve well as noise and sight barriers from the airport and the nearby highway. As a business location, I give it a mixed rating. It has a small business center with two uncomfortable stations, a copy machine, fax machine, and both wireless and wired ethernet Internet. The business center would have been better had it not been just an extension of the front desk which made for very difficult phone calls with a client of mine when I needed to go down there because there were phones ringing and kids screaming in the lobby. I would have stayed in my hotel room and done my business up there, but the wireless signal was so unreliable that I had no choice but to get work done in the biz center. I know I harped on a lot of negatives in my review, but really it was an ok place to stay... just not for the money they're charging.