Best Business Hotels in Anchorage

Most people come to Anchorage for the wilderness. A good number come for work, because Anchorage is the commercial centre of Alaska: oil and gas, air freight, fishing, government and a convention trade that fills the Dena'ina Center several times a year.

Naming specific hotels and rates is a good way to be wrong within a year, so here is how to choose instead.

Pick your location first

Downtown is where you want to be if your business is with government, law firms or the convention centre, and if you want to be able to walk to dinner. The downtown grid is compact and the hotels there are within a few minutes of each other and of the Anchorage Museum.

Midtown is where a lot of the corporate offices actually are, along the Seward Highway corridor. Hotels here are newer, cheaper and duller, and you will need a car.

By the airport makes sense for a short in-and-out trip. Ted Stevens is only about ten minutes from downtown, so the saving is marginal unless your meetings are at the airport itself, which in a freight town they might be.

What to check before booking

Free wifi that actually works, which is not a given in a state where bandwidth costs more than it does in the lower 48.

Whether the restaurant serves breakfast early enough for your schedule. Alaska runs on the same clock as everywhere else while having none of the daylight, and in winter a 7am meeting happens in the dark.

Airport shuttle timings, and whether they run year-round or only in season.

Parking, which many downtown hotels charge for separately.

The thing that will surprise you: seasonality

Anchorage hotel rates swing more between seasons than in almost any American city. The summer visitor season, roughly late May to early September, fills the city and pushes rates up sharply. From October to April the same room can cost half as much.

If your travel dates are flexible and the business is not, a winter trip is dramatically cheaper.

The corollary: if you are travelling in July, book early. Summer conference weeks combined with cruise passengers can leave the city genuinely full.

If you have a spare afternoon

You are 45 minutes from the Turnagain Arm, one of the most spectacular short drives in the United States, with beluga whales sometimes visible from the road and a tidal bore that comes up the inlet.

The Tony Knowles Coastal Trail starts downtown and runs 18 km along the water, and moose on it are common enough that people stop being surprised.

Flightseeing to Denali can be done in an afternoon from Anchorage or Talkeetna, weather permitting, which in practice means about a third of the time.