Image © Jose 2025
Most of us get to travel, many of us do it for work. What is usually great in the beginning of our career turns into a drag as we get older, not only because we and our bodies don’t handle travel and jet lag as well, but because many of us have a home that we long to go back to. It doesn’t help that most of us cannot travel in business and stay at five-star hotels, but even when we do, the feeling of not being home is real.
I’ve had a few situations where, for a glimpse of time, it’s not home but we feel we could live there. I’ve lived in a hotel for a while; a company that hired me was helping me find an apartment, fun in the first three weeks, then boring and dangerous. I ate so much at the hotel restaurant that I gained 15 pounds. Lived for a period in an aparthotel, a solution that tries to fake it as your apartment, never the same. And I guess it’s expected; these places are not meant to feel like your home. No matter how much they try to learn about you, set things in a way that you feel recognized, welcomed, pampered, it’s very hard.
Let’s talk about the feeling of not being home, not even close. I spent four nights in a shabby place, by choice. While company policy is fairly regimented, at my level I am allowed a few exceptions. Reality is I tend to think as if it is my money, and in this case, the event I was attending was already pricey, and I knew I was going to spend most of my time outside. So, I made a conscious choice to stay in a budget hotel close enough to the event place, which was a five-star hotel and spa.
While nothing bad happened, and I didn’t end up with bedbug bites or similar (it did happen to me), the feeling of staying in a place like this is the opposite of feeling at home.
If you happen to arrive late like I did, you encounter an empty reception desk with a bright 4000K light fixture that reminds you that we are surrounded by bad lighting (I was attending a lighting design event). Out comes a sleepy receptionist who does her best to get us to our rooms as fast as possible – for my sake and hers. The mechanical process is impersonal and generic, no matter how much smiling or how many trivial questions take place.
You push your roller to an elevator that is just as tired as the floor and the ceiling you just walked through. You land in a lobby with a left and right exit, they look exactly the same; paying attention where to turn at that time of night can be a challenge. You go down this long corridor with doors on the left and right; the carpet has so many stains that you don’t know anymore if they are part of the design, which was purposefully chosen to hide the stains.
You enter the room (yes, the key this time worked). They are always painted yellow, with fake wood trimming and curtains of dirty white. The furniture is from different generations, different materials, different makes; it feels like they were picked from a garage sale. The desk is too high, the chair doesn’t go high enough, the bed is an attempt to be a king size, the mattress is too soft and feels like it has the body of all the previous guests imprinted in it. The bathroom is dark with one light, too bright with two; the floor has broken tiles, the shower points everywhere except where I want it to point. The towels look and feel clean, but a closer look reveals that maybe I shouldn’t look too close. The shampoo and hand soap smell like all the artificial ingredients they contain. I take out my own soap.
You don’t hang your clothes; you have your shorts and t-shirt on at all times, and you always use your flip-flops. I open the bed, never understanding what type of folding design they all do, I choose the firmest pillow, which is never firm enough, and place the other pillows in a nearby chair. Take a shower, go to sleep.
The next day, the room service changes the towels even though I left them hanging and tucks my bedspread again, while I clearly untucked it the previous night. Puts all the pillows back on the bed. Rinse and repeat, three nights, four days. Horrible, right?
Well, yes, expectedly. These hotels belong to a chain that has a tiered offer, this is their cheapest brand. The hotels are typically run privately via a franchise model. The folks that run this large hotel probably don’t make enough money to make structural improvements, except when they are planned in advance. I might have been there three weeks before they changed the bathroom tiles, three months before they do their annual carpet cleaning.
It’s easy to mumble despairing things about the maintenance guy, but he might not have a budget to work from. He keeps repairing and maintaining things long after they are officially dead, and for that, he is appreciated by management. You look around, the hotel has a lot of people that seem okay with the place they are in; some of them might be in a much better place than they were before. The hotel might be suited to them, and I might be the exception. But I am a voluntary exception; I chose to stay there, and nothing bad happened, I survived.
I feel this experience is occasionally important; it strengthens your critical attention to detail, questions your definitions of value and quality, promotes character and tolerance. The hotel sends the typical NPS score survey, and I either don’t fill it out, or if I do, I give them a three and then detail all I found to be areas that may be improved. But I do not compare them to the other five-star experiences I have had; I evaluate them relative to other hotels in the same tier.
This whole experience makes you feel so happy and delighted to arrive home.