A seating area in the new Renaissance Boston’s sleek lobby

“Delightful luxury” is one of the brand pillars of Renaissance Hotels & Resorts, and it certainly holds true at the chain’s newest property, The Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel. Design, along with impeccable service, are the new hallmarks of Renaissance, which has become the preferred hotel chain for this traveling businesswoman, having visiting three of its hotels in as many months.

Sleek and hip are perfectly applicable adjectives for the Boston Renaissance, which opened in March in the city’s burgeoning seaport district. The architects and interior designers used the sea as their inspiration and paid homage to the great luxury liners of the 1930s and 1940s, including the Normandie and the Queen Elizabeth.

With 456 guest rooms and 15 suites on 21 floors, the Renaissance is the newest hotel in the 1,000-acre South Boston neighborhood, where development has been spurred by the opening of the Boston Convention and Exposition Center two years ago.

The Renaissance is just two blocks from the new BCEC and its 793-room headquarters hotel, The Westin, and with the nearby 261-room Seaport Hotel and 424-room InterContinental, the Renaissance rounds out a package that makes the area far more attractive for larger groups. The BCEC sits about two miles from the city’s older convention center, The Hynes, which is located in the city’s Back Bay area and is also surrounded by good meeting hotels.

But the Renaissance serves as a smart choice for planners of small- to midsized stand-alone meetings, particularly financial services meetings, because of its extremely convenient access to Logan International Airport (a “two-minute ride,” according to one recent visitor) and to Boston’s two other main thoroughfares, the Mass. Pike and I-93; to Fidelity and John Hancock offices across the street; and to the rest of Boston’s financial district, a stone’s throw across the Fort Point Channel.

The hotel boasts 20,736 square feet of meeting space, including a 10,700-square-foot ballroom and a 4,400-square-foot ballroom on the same floor and an outdoor terrace roof deck that is spectacular in the warmer weather. Nearby, the Bank of America Pavilion offers enough space that one pharma company will use it, in addition to the hotel’s space, for an upcoming product launch.

The hotel’s on-site restaurant, 606 Congress (the hotel’s address), is under the direction of acclaimed chef and restaurateur Michael Scholow.

“Another major focus of Renaissance is technology,” says David Keamy, CMP, director of sales and marketing for the property, who helped introduce high-speed interconnectivity to the Boston Marriott Copley Place well before any other convention hotel was paying attention back in the 90s. The Renaissance offers DS-3 lines, 28 times faster than T1, and allows planners and guests to stream video, host videoconferences, and run their largest Internet-based presentations—simultaneously—without sacrificing speed.

Two More for the Road

The Renaissance Washington, DC Hotel, located downtown and within two blocks of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, offers 64,000 square feet of meeting space just an escalator ride down from the main lobby, which includes 30 meeting rooms. The staff is a standout at this hotel, bending over backward to accommodate a discerning traveler’s needs.

At its neighbor some 35 miles up the road, The Renaissance Harborplace Hotel in Baltimore is a few blocks from that city’s convention center, and it serves as a perfect meeting hotel in its own right. Just steps from the Inner Harbor, the hotel recently announced the opening of Watertable, its new restaurant and lounge. More than 85 percent of its meeting space is on one level.

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