LUMA Hotel Brings Times Square An Escape For Tourists And Locals

Photo Credit: LUMA Hotel

Finding a hotel in Times Square is tricky. It wasn’t long ago that Times Square was not a place to be after dark. Today, Times Square is safe, lively, and rarely ever dark with hundreds of lights beaming down on from above. Often, Times Square has a reputation of being a hotbed of tourists, high prices, and traffic. LUMA Hotel is ready to change that.

Photo Credit: LUMA Hotel

LUMA Hotel, located between Broadway and 6^th Avenue, is a great gateway to midtown. For tourists, its central to every Times Square landmark, easy access to the subways, and is far enough away from the noise and lights that when you close the curtains to go to bed, you’re not inundated with neon humming. For locals, it’s a surprisingly refreshing reprieve from the average New Yorker’s experience in the city. If you didn’t know associate it with Times Square, you might even think it was an interesting, fun new neighborhood New Yorkers could give a trendy name, like Mo-Glo. The neighborhood is also populated by some of the best restaurants in the city, from Sen Sakana and DaDong gathering hype, to the recently revamped rooms of the legendary Four Seasons, newly crowned as The Grill and The Pool.

Photo Credit: LUMA Hotel

The rooms themselves are exactly what travelers need from a Times Square hotel, with an added boost of luxe lifestyles. The hotel offers the welcomed relief of space, something treasured in the world of midtown hotels. By building upward rather than inward, each floor only has a few guestrooms, meaning each offers more space to lay clothes around, sprawl out, and not have to eat room service in bed. (Though we’ll all do that anyway.) Beds are big and plush, with hotel cornered sheets tucked so tight I didn’t realize there was a bed sheet on it until about 30 minutes after getting into bed. True New Yorkers know that Midtown is the land of construction sites, so having a room on a higher floor goes a long way in terms of views. For those staycationing and looking for a fun night in, drawing the blackout curtain and flicking on HBO can be just as rewarding. Rooms come with a mini bar, stocked with the tiny bottles for the perfect cocktail portion, with larger bottles available in-room for when you realize what the minibar just cost you. The bathrooms are also in pristine condition with glass standing showers, luxe amenities available, and plush robes to towel off in.

Photo Credit: LUMA Hotel

The hotel also features its in-house restaurant, Ortzi. Ortzi has found success independent of the hotel. While most New York hotel restaurants, a trend that’s become exceedingly popular for top-shelf chefs, do best for dinner menus for their proximity, this tapas restaurant is a favorite of midtown lunchtime meetings and rendezvous. The menu encompasses a great selection of seafood from octopus ceviche to cod dishes to crab selections, and is built to share.

LUMA Hotel is not the Waldorf Astoria or the Four Seasons—though it doesn’t want or need to be. It has built itself, with a successful start, as a middle point of accessibility to travelers, while still extending great amenities and offerings to guests looking for the higher-end of New York lifestyle. For those looking to compare New York’s two faces, of tourism and reality, LUMA Hotel is a destination to blend both worlds.