The Element Omaha Midtown Crossing had its grand opening today. It seems about a week ago they stopped taking reservations and were going to delay the opening, but they started to take reservations again this week and I was able to book a room.

The website shows the BAR M-F for the cheapest room at $129 and the weekend rate is $99. Though I was able to call and get the smallest room with a king sized bed for $69.

The opening was very nice. They had a ribbon cutting, speeches, free alcohol and free food. The manager and employees are very very friendly and seem very excited to be working at the hotel. It seems that they will continue the free light dinner service Mon-Thurs with complimentary alcohol. I was very impressed with the customer service.

I think like most other Element hotels, they've had some issues during their opening. The internet has gone down a few times and it seems half of the rooms on the 8th floor do not have working televisions (including mine). I'm sure all of the small issues will be worked out quickly.

One major issues may come from rooms facing Dodge street, which is most odd numbered rooms. The road noise even up to the 8th floor during the day
was fairly noticeable during heavy and light traffic. I was able to get another room. I'm not sure if the noise gets any better at night, this may not be an issue for some but I'm a light sleeper. The smallest rooms with a king size bed have smaller refrigerators that are also pretty noisy when they cycle. Noise from the cycling refrigerator has often been complained about on tripadvisor, but it looks as if all other rooms with full sized refrigerators got new models and I have not had any issues with the noise from the fridge.

This is currently the newest element hotel. The only other element I've been to is in Baltimore. There seems to be a few small differences.

- The rooms feel 5-10% smaller for some reason in the Omaha hotel, but I could be wrong.

- They do not give out bottles of water, each sink now has a separate tap for filtered water to make the hotel more "green".

- The televisions in Omaha are a newer line of Philips that seem to have a much better picture and flip through the channels much faster. They still have not fixed the problem of having the televison mounted on a decent swivel stand.

- The connection bar for the inputs to the television is apparently suppose to have a bluetooth features where you should be able to stream audio from your itouch or iphone. I have yet to see this in action.

- Two button flush on the toilets and an improved clock next to the bed.