Vicarious Travel

Two interesting discoveries today:

• The blog of a hotel general manager (for the Hawthorne Hotel), detailing such things as meals and furnishing purchases
• HotelChatter’s interview with Gregory Peck, owner of The Crescent, Beverly Hills

Tablet10 is a book from TabletHotels (about which I have already raved): ten new hotels in the Americas (both north and south), described in essays, photography, and interviews with the designers.

It’s a pretty book. A good thing for a hotel-geek’s coffee table, maybe. It certainly put me in the mood to visit some of the hotels, especially the beautifully relaxed-looking bobo in Buenos Aires. The interviews with designers and owners are pretty interesting, especially the interview with Scott Lee from SB Architects; not least the line

If you ask enough people, you’ll talk yourself out of every single good idea.

…which does pretty much capture my experience of design processes.

At the same time, I found myself wanting… well, more. More depth in the interviews, mostly. Some are longer and more insightful than others; but even at best you only get a little of the nitty-gritty detail stuff, the sense of the experience of designing a hotel from scratch. I suppose that’s only reasonable; the kind of thing I want to know would be a whole book’s worth of material for each hotel anyway.

I keep coming back to the question of what I would want in my ideal hotel, if I were designing one. So far my list looks like this…

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The Gift of Travel is an anthology from Traveler’s Tales, a collection taken out of an assortment of other Traveler’s Tales books (which tend to be organized by location or by theme, covering such things as “Love” or “Food” or “Gutsy Women”). Most of the entries are short; most describe some transforming moment in a traveler’s life.

It’s a very mixed bag. The chief problem, if I can call it that, lies in the choice of subject matter; travel does have considerable spiritual power, but the difficulty is how very internal these kinds of experiences tend to be, and how subjective. It very often happens that being in a foreign place, among people who speak a different language, evokes a powerful admiration, affection, even love, for the strangers: a sense that they have something in their culture that our own culture lacks. And because the circumstances are so alienating, the slightest gesture of hospitality or kindness takes on great importance. Such things are often almost impossible to put into writing, except in the vague and watery language of inspirational literature.

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Back when I could afford to travel less and there were fewer hotel websites on the internet, I used to do most of my hotel-admiring and similar lusting through the services of two magazines.

One was Condé Nast Traveler: lots of photographs, lots of profiles of glittery places to stay; lots of top-ten lists and other rankings of places. They have some consumer-reports style studies of things like cruise lines (though, again, generally looking at the kinds of services and locations that would be chosen by the better-off traveler). Just as an indicator, the associated concierge.com website carries an article on Budget Travel in Europe where the cutoff for a budget hotel is 250 euros, or $324 at the current exchange rate: there are budgets and budgets, clearly. Condé Nast Traveler also has a highly entertaining column of letters sent to their ombudsman, a kind of freelance agent who will try to resolve customers’ problems with hotels, cruise lines, and resorts, and report back on what resolution was reached (if any).

The other was National Geographic Traveler: less consciously luxury-oriented and containing more stories about personal experiences abroad, this is a better bet for identifying places where a non-wealthy might want to stay, and provides a broader range of other insight as well.

I’ve since moved house a few times, deactivating those subscriptions and not renewing them, though I do sometimes page through copies on the newsstand. Sometime I may order them again, but not right now. These days, my hotel-porn site of choice is the lovely Tablet Hotels, which is better than both.

Tablet features mostly, but not exclusively, higher-end hotels; there are some places that book in at under $100/night. They match Condé Nast for gorgeous photos, but also offer slyer commentary and a better sense of proportion. One gets the sense that Tablet reviewers know we don’t all want to spend $500 a night on a room, and that we’re less interested in a hotel’s brand shininess than on what they actually deliver. And Tablet reviews focus on places with character, charm, personality — places you’re likely to remember staying.

So they’re great for browsing, and they’re great for picking a room, as well — if you can find one in your designated area. (I recently went to book a room in Minneapolis and found that Tablet Hotels does not list a single property there; none in the state, in fact; the midwest in general seems to be sparely covered, except for Chicago and a few similar places. I’m not sure whether this simply means that there aren’t many Tablet-worthy properties in Minneapolis, or whether the ones that are there simply haven’t been “discovered” by the website yet.) Still, if you can find a Tablet Hotel that you want to stay in, a further treat is in store for you: booking through the website has the smoothest, most intuitive interface of any online hotel booking service I’ve used. Email confirmation is immediate and Tablet will follow up with you a few days after your stay to request your feedback — and if enough customers dislike a hotel, it will disappear from the site again.

Using the Tablet website is a bit like using an iPod: you know you’re working with the product of a designer. That word carries all sorts of connotations that aren’t quite right — there are a gazillion people who will call themselves web designers while producing the most ghastly unusable interfaces, while “designer” in the fashion world carries connotations of costliness, ego, and impracticality. But if you go back to the basic meaning, design — careful thought about how something can and should be used, and how to make that experience as pleasant as possible — is at the heart of any great product. Being interested in design isn’t necessarily about being a snob, a rich person, or a fashionista, and being good at it is a sign that you practice what you study. The Tablet site does both.

Even if you aren’t booking a hotel any time soon, Tablet is just fun. A few of my personal favorites to gawk at:

• The Machu Picchu Sanctuary Lodge, right inside the ancient site
• Dar Warda, Marrakech, a four-bedroom palace in Morocco
• Jake’s in Jamaica, which looks far more appealing than just about any big Jamaican resort I’ve seen
• The Sanderson, which got into the news recently because David Hasselhoff ran into one of their chandeliers and caused himself injury

One of my journal entries from July 2000 or so starts with, “I don’t know why I bother to travel at all, if I don’t have a notebook.” And while this probably overstates the case, a good notebook is as valuable as a camera in any kind of exploratory travel. If you’re the sort of person who likes to keep a travel journal, you’ll need something to write it in, and it’s not always possible to whip out your laptop, even if you carry one. And if you don’t journal, you may still like to collect a bunch of hotel addresses and reservation information in one book, where you can look it all up conveniently.

I carried lots of different notebooks all over Europe and the US. And there was something wrong with most of them. Those black-and-white covered composition books tend to let ink bleed through the pages and get shabby easily. “Nice” blank books, intended for journaling, don’t always lie flat enough to write in comfortably, or they bend so much near the spine that you lose a lot of your writing space. Ring-bound books lie flat and sometimes have thick enough paper, but the rings can get snagged on other things in your luggage, and they also disintegrate, which is terrible if you plan to keep these notebooks as a permanent record. And then I had gripes about size (too large, too small, too thick, too narrow) and cover quality (sometimes it ripped off).

Ultimately I did find the one true notebook, and I’m here, in the fashion of Cook’s Illustrated, to tell you what it is: the Moleskine notebook. Each one comes with a frankly silly little note explaining how this was the brand preferred by Picasso et al., but don’t let this put you off: moleskines really are that good. The paper is thick enough, the pages lie flat, the covers are sturdy and don’t tear off; the books come in two sizes; there’s an elastic strap that holds the book closed and keeps it from getting beaten up inside your backpack or luggage. The small pocket at the back is a good place to hold small paper souvenirs such as tickets or a couple of postcards. A thin ribbon is provided to mark your place.

You can get other moleskins than the one I’ve linked to — they do blank paper, music paper, graph paper, etc., as well as address books and planners, and smaller-sized versions for people who want to carry the book in a pocket. But this one is my absolute favorite.

They’re a bit more expensive than other notebooks, but after I bought my first one, I’ve never blinked at the price. They’re just about perfect.

There are many lines of travel guide out on the market, and picking among them can be a little overwhelming. What’s more, a lot of the information traditionally available in travel guides can now also be found on the internet: it’s as easy or easier to choose and book a hotel, train, or airplane flight online, and the rate information and schedules are likely to be more up-to-date. (Of course, in the old days, one left this kind of thing to travel agents. You still can, but personally I have been frustrated the couple of times I have tried to use a professional travel agent; I prefer checking out my options myself.)

Whatever you do, don’t buy a guide covering too enormous an area: a guide to Europe or the USA is not going to give you enough information about anywhere you go. If you’re really traveling for months and months on end through a wide range of areas, plan to buy new guidebooks as you go along, or swap for them: I picked up several guidebooks from other students at hostels when I was taking the train around Europe.

I also recommend against top-ten guides and other lists that offer themselves as a simplified, stripped-down approach to “doing” a place. Sure, if you want, you can hit just the standard tourist highlights and nothing else; but it seems like a pity, and the odds are fair that you’ll find yourself in some situation or wanting to explore some destination that they don’t cover. If you’re going someplace at all, it’s worth spending a bit of time to familiarize yourself with the location.

Still, the line to buy will depend a lot on what you want to do.

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When everything else has gone from my brain — the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family — when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of the land as it lay this way and that.

So begins Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, which does not bill itself as a travel narrative, but which contains an eloquent love letter to Pittsburgh. If you’re headed that way, it’s worth a read, especially of the early pages.

If you’re not, well, it’s worth reading anyway.

A few days ago I posted negatively about my experience on the Amtrak Coast Starlight route. As it turns out, the trip north is much better: one gets daylight for the Pacific beaches near Santa Barbara and the mountainous passes of southern Oregon. We also hit fewer delays, I think because we were passing over the “dangerous” bits of track at a time of day when they didn’t have anyone working on them anyway.

So if you’re contemplating a plane/train combination trip (especially if you’re taking it in winter), I recommend making the southbound leg your plane flight and doing the train northbound.

If you’re interested in hotels and the hotel industry, you may enjoy some of the odd rumors and chat on HotelChatter.com. Similarly, Hotel Hotsheet is a blog with lots on what’s going on out there.

Is there any point in following this stuff for the ordinary traveler? No, not really. But it’s fun stuff if you happen to be freakishly interested in hotels.

Link of the day: Unusual Hotels of the World. Not so much a selection of good hotels, necessarily, but of strange and often kitschily ridiculous places, yes. If you’ve ever wanted to stay overnight in a tree house, a cave, or an ice palace, they’ve got something for you.