Do hotels offers rooms with ashtrays as a way to accommodate smokers or punish them?
Last week, HTG headed to Atlantic City with Greyhound (it was part of the Lucky Streak blogger fest) to check out that other place where legal gambling occurs and an ocean laps up against the shore.
As dubious hipsters, we will admit that we enjoy a smokey treat or two. Smoking is still legal, though the general idea of smoking has had a rough go of it lately. Nowadays, you can’t smoke in many restaurants, bars and within 75 feet of many entrances to public buildings. We’re fine with that. Non smokers are people too and we wouldn’t want their pink lungs molested by the goodness of nicotine.
Throughout the casinos in Atlantic City, we found segregated slot machines and areas that included 
smoking and non smoking machines — though there seemed to be a large amount of $1 machines in the smoking areas, requiring us to pay more to sit there and look inconspicuous.
Living in our own self-involved world, we weren’t aware of the growing hatred of smokers. Some people, it appears, don’t like to to eat with tasty cigarette smoke wafting through the air like a Humphry Bogart movie. That delicious silver lines adding depth to any picture, we thought, was always a good thing. Maybe this growing disdain explains all of those judgmental stares and snide comments we’ve started hearing during our filtered lives.
And yes, we know we know it’s an unhealthy lifestyle and we could be shortening our lives, but we figure we’re just cutting short those end years — where we would complain about rock and roll while driving around with our left blinker perpetually on. We really weren’t looking forward to that life so much to begin with.
So when we checked into our smoking room at the Atlantic City Hilton, we thought it would be fine. 
After all, we’re heading into a room where all of our second hand smoke will just effect us and we don’t have to listen to someone sitting next to a smoking section complain about the cigarette smoke.
The room itself at the Hilton was OK. It was spacious and even came with a little coffee machine, and you know how nice that first cigarette tastes with a cup of Jo.
The room is the place you crash after clubbing and dancing and general trouble making the casinos afford you. There’s plenty of fun to be had in AC, so why not enjoy it.
Check out the pictures and decide for yourself.
However, what you can’t see is the smell of these rooms. There’s a distinct smell that comes with any hotel smoking room — a chemical/acidic smell that comes with smoking rooms in hotels. It smells like a lab dipped in cleaning fluid. It’s not enjoyable.
When you wake up in the morning, you’re not sure if the headache you’re feeling is from too much fun 
or just from the sheets. The smoking room feels more like punishment for having a habit than a place designed to cater to smokers. There has got be better ways to clean up these rooms without having them reek of, well, cigarettes.
Of course, if you smoke in a “regular” room — you can face stiff penalties and fines — costing hundreds of dollars. We understand this, as stupid as we may think these rules are.
Naturally, we don’t expect or even want non smokers to sympathize with our addiction. But the hotels shouldn’t feel it necessary to punish us for smoking and then asking for a room that will allow us to enjoy a smokey treat or two.
Next time, however, we’ll probably get a non smoking room and just go outside — we can handle the looks and hand waving in front of passer-bys. See, when you smoke, you don’t use your middle finger.
Cheap Hurghada Holiday - Cheap Hurghada holidays are easy to book when you click on this link.
