One of my good friends recently finished medical school and is moving out of state for her residency so we wanted to plan a short trip as a sort of last hurrah. We had a few destinations in mind: New Orleans, Nashville, Seattle and Portland. We also knew it would probably be only a 3-day trip since I have work and was already taking time off for other trips. In the end, I found fairly decent pricing for round-trip (direct) flights to New Orleans, Louisiana on Southwest Airlines for only $262. Also, we both love raw oysters and drinking so it seemed like the perfect choice.
THE DECISION-MAKING
We quickly booked the flights but kind of dragged on the hotel decision. Simply, there are SO many hotels in New Orleans. We did narrow it down to Marriott hotels since my friend has platinum status which gets us 4 pm late checkout and with a departure time of 9:25 pm, the later the checkout time, the better.
However, even after narrowing it down to Marriott hotels, there are still plenty of options. I figured, I wanted to be near the Bourbon Street area of the French Quarter but I didn’t actually want to be in the midst of it since it’d likely be louder there. In the end we booked 3 nights at the Renaissance New Orleans Pere Marquette Hotel located on a smaller street off Canal Street. It was a good choice because some of the other options were directly on Canal Street which was much busier and crowded whereas our hotel was on a smaller quieter street.
THE HOTEL
We were in a guest room with two double beds which was actually very spacious. There was a lot of empty space between the beds and the desk/TV. As a Marriott platinum member, my friend also opted for free breakfast which was actually $15 vouchers per person per day and could be used at any time at any hotel restaurant or cafe for food and drinks. We ended up with a total of $90 in vouchers. There was also a little VIP pantry for platinum members that was stocked with bottled waters, sparkling waters, sodas, iced teas, a coffee machine, chips and other snacks that was accessible with a room key 24/7. The pantry saved us some money since we didn’t have to buy any water and also had snacks for when we were hungry in the hotel.
THE DINING
With the $90 in vouchers, we spent a portion at the little cafe inside the hotel called New Orleans Coffee & Beignet Company for coffee and biegnets and then the rest at the hotel restaurant called Tacklebox.
We went to Tacklebox (a seafood restaurant) for a late dinner (really a second dinner) almost purely because we did not want to waste the vouchers. The restaurant was mostly empty and honestly I never really saw it filled with many people at any point during the stay. While there, we ordered a dozen raw oysters, crawfish hushpuppies, crawfish boil soup and the shrimp louie wedge salad. The crawfish hushpuppies were my favorite. They were actually on the menu as part of a fried seafood platter but I asked if I could just order the one item and they were able to accommodate and I am so glad I asked. When they first came out, I thought they were over-fried but when you bit in, they were perfect.
We also ordered two cocktails but halfway through the meal, they still had not come out and we had to ask our waiter about them. He was really nice and apologetic about it and when he finally brought them over, he told us that he had comped them since it took so long. And because the drinks were comped, we were actually able to fully cover the meal with the remaining vouchers.
OVERALL IMPRESSION
I liked the location and that the hotel wasn’t too noisy. If you have platinum benefits, it’s even better with the late checkout, the vouchers and the VIP pantry. The room was also fairly spacious and all of the staff were very kind. Also, we rarely ran into other people in the elevators and the elevators always arrived fairly quickly which is always a plus in my book.
Renaissance New Orleans Pere Marquette Hotel
Address: 817 Common Street, New Orleans, LA 70112
Quick Note: My apologies for the lack of photographs. I did not realize until I started writing that I literally had zero photos of anything related to the hotel. Everything I had taken photos of was through Instagram stories and I had not saved the photos.
one trip led to another 