I have just stayed at the Victoria Hotel Melbourne. I booked it through www.WotIf.com and paid ~$110 per night instead of the list price of $186 per night.
The location is great (little Collins St near Swanston St). It’s a short walk from most things that are in the central city area and the nearest tram stop has a tram that goes directly to Melbourne University which will be good for people attending LCA (although it’s close enough that you might want to walk and save a few dollars). The price is pretty good too (you don’t get much cheaper than that in the central city area).
But there are some down-sides. The hotel is old and has an old design. It has small windows and air-conditioners are retro-fitted into the window (as opposed to the modern design of having huge windows and A/C in the ceiling). The air-conditioning is barely adequate and once the hotel walls heat up the room will be warm all night. The window-based air-conditioning also greatly diminishes the possibility of looking out the window, and for people who are tall enough to see over it they will probably find that the bed is too short for them (I stayed in a twin room, maybe a double bed would be longer – of course if I was alone in a double bed then I could probably sleep diagonally).
The room lights are all halogen spotlights, that includes the reading lights over the beds. This is 90’s architectural fashion and not a functional design. If you want to lie on your bed to read a book or watch TV then you will be able to see at least three halogen lights from the corner of your eye. Seeing such a small intense light source in your peripheral vision is really unpleasant.
The pool is about 5M*5M in size and approximately 1.1M deep (it seems deeper than a 1.0M pool I recently swam in but shallower than a 1.2M pool).
In conclusion I think that the Oaks on Market [1] apartments are better value for money, altough Market street is less convenient.
Update: I forgot to mention one last failing. For curtains my room had nothing other than a Venetian blind. As such a blind does not cover the entire window space I was woken by the sun rise. It’s bad enough seeing a sunrise after a hard night coding, I definitely don’t want to see one when I had planned to sleep in. Curtains that properly cover the window is not an expensive feature to add.