I'm normally not a hotel snob, happy to stay wherever there is a roof over my head and a comfortable bed beneath me. I love to splurg a little here and there, but that generally means that I stayed at a place where breakfast was included in the price. But the complimentary night I spent at the Brown Palace, an historic luxury hotel and spa in downtown Denver, changed much of that and set the bar quite a bit higher.

For the better part of the last seven year...