I stayed at several Holiday Inn Express locations on a recent midwestern trip and was impressed across the board. The rooms are good-sized, comfortable and clean. The bathrooms feature outstanding shower heads and those clever rounded shower curtain tracks that prevent the curtains from blowing in on you. The free breakfast buffetts are excellent.

The Brandon location was especially reasonably priced - perhaps because it's right on I-90, although noise wasn't a problem. There's a huge sports bar called Tailgators directly behind the hotel. The food's pretty good and the portions are generous, to say the least.

My only qualms about this hotel were that the entrance was strange - an airlock with a banker style window filled to the brim with file boxes! - and that there's apparently no elevator to the second floor.