Couple Marks 66th Anniversary With $15.75 Waldorf Astoria Hotel Room
How do you get a room at the uber-luxurious and exclusive Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City for less than $20 a night?
If you are Tony and Jo Fioravante, 86 and 85, respectively, you simply hold on to the original receipt from your stay there 66 years ago.
The Staten Island couple will celebrate their 66 th wedding anniversary Sunday the same way they spent their wedding night, with a stay at the Waldorf Astoria.
The couple, who kept their original receipt from 1948, will also pay the same rate for their room at the exclusive Towers of the Waldorf on Park Avenue, a whopping $15.75.
Hotel rates now start at $799 for suites and $1,299 for presidential-style suites.
The Fioravantes are cashing in on the hotel's long-standing tradition of honoring the original rate for couples celebrating an anniversary of 50 years or more who spent their wedding night at the Waldorf and kept the receipt after all those years.
"We had a party for their 50th anniversary and I noticed the receipt and put it out with other memories," daughter Sandra Fioravante said. "Now that it's their 66 th anniversary, I remembered it and thought I'd get in touch with the hotel.
"They were so nice," Fioravante, one of the couple's three children, said of the Waldorf staff. "It really is amazing."
This time around, the Fioravantes will likely not have to worry about a snafu they ran into at the hotel on their wedding night.
As their receipt shows, the couple was first given a room with double beds on their wedding night before the hotel staff realized the mistake and quickly corrected it, according to their daughter.
The Fioravantes' ties to New York City go back even before their Waldorf stay. The couple met at a P.S. 216 school dance, in Brooklyn, when they were 13 and 14.
"It was almost like 'West Side Story,' like Tony and Maria," Fioravante said. "And they've stood together ever since."