In between various office keeping chores today, I worked on trying to sort out hotel reservations for my upcoming vacation. This is somewhat complicated, as I will be staying in four different cities and have three separate stays in one of them. I did one reservation earlier, because I was worried about availability. But I need to get the rest of them finished so I can fill out my pre-foreign travel security paperwork.
All of that is to explain why I'm thinking about the subject of hotels. It's always difficult selecting a hotel in a city you've never been to before. You can read all the guidebooks (or internet reviews) in the world, but it's hard to say how things will measure up. That said, I do find that what I think of as the middle class guidebooks (Frommer's and Fodor's) are usually reasonably accurate in their descriptions. It's Frommer's that I have to thank for finding a wonderful place to stay in Osaka (Family Inn Fifty's Edobori)- at under 50 bucks a night, including breakfast and free internet, no less.
Sometimes instinct and good luck web browsing can turn up a gem. I really liked the Violino d'Oro in Venice, for example, and had chosen it more for a reasonably price at a desired location than for anything else. Other times, you end up with drab and dull for the sake of convenience, as in whatever happens to be the closest hotel to pretty much any European train station.
You can play things safe and stay at major chains. I have lots of Hilton points and a fair number of Marriott points, mostly earned via business travel at their more mid-range brands. It's worth using points for a night or two in a major city, where it's hard to find anything decent at a reasonable price. But the big chains are generally oriented towards business travel and that often makes their locations inconvenient for tourist purposes. You have to think hard about the transportation implications.
Often I travel to places where there aren't a lot of options. The phrase "best available" should strike dread into anybody reading it on a travel itinerary. But there can be pleasant surprises. I had low expectations for the Red Cross Hotel in Gyumri, Armenia, for example, but it turned out to be perfectly comfortable. The Auberge du Grand Popo in Benin, on the other hand ...
My favorite hotel experience of all time was at the Library Hotel in New York. How could I resist a place where the check-in process involved being asked "fiction or nonfiction"? With accomodations in a suitably book-filled room, it pretty much felt like home.
The bad hotel experiences usually involved excessive noise, lumpy mattresses, or plumbing problems. I can tolerate lack of hot water in the developing world, but not on a business trip to San Francisco. And then there are the places that are downright scary. I love ceiling fans and mosquito nets, but I don't want to have to tape up holes in the netting using my ever present supply of duct tape. My all time scariest hotel night was at a motel in Longmont, Colorado. I'd had to make a business trip during University of Colorado's graduation week and there wasn't a lot of choice. The motel we ended up at was across the street from the cemetery and right next to a drive-through liquor store. The denizens of the former were quiet. A patron of the latter, however, stood more or less just outside my window cursing half the night.
Finally, I have one serious complaint about hotel web sites. All too many of them don't include a map anywhere. Yes, you can go to your favorite mapping site and find out where the hotel is that way, but it's an extra step that really should not be necessary. Proximity to some attraction or another is often what pushes me to choose one place over another, so hotels should make that information easier to find.
Copyright 2006 Miriam H. Nadel