Craving a last burst of irresponsibility and armed with precious insider information, Paul Carr decided to see whether he could live ? not only well, but cheaply ? in hotels for a year
I don't notice the man in the grey suit taking my bag.
I mean, I do notice him ? but in his smart grey Savile Row suit and his patent-leather shoes, he looks just like any other hotel guest. I'm dimly aware of him gliding past me as I'm signing the guest register, but by the time I turn around he's gone.
And with him, my bag.
A professional.
I smile.
The receptionist hands me back my debit card, having pre-authorised it for any incidentals I might incur during my stay. In other hotels they take as much as �200 or �300. But the Lanesborough ? one of the most expensive hotels in London ? has swiped a grand from my current account, just in case.
Given the cost of a room at the hotel, the pre-authorisation wasn't too outrageous. The standard ? or "rack" ? rate for my suite is a little over �800 a night. I do the maths: �6,000 a week, �312,000 a year. Plus tax and gratuities, of course. No wonder the Lanesborough is one of the few hotels in the world where they don't charge you extra for the in-room pornography.
I was here to celebrate my 30th, so pushed the boat out a bit, though I didn't pay anything like that.
For me this isn't a break from the pressures of my normal, everyday life ? a nice birthday treat before returning to the rat race. This is my normal, everyday life. And it's all because of my membership of a very unusual club. A club with no joining fees and where anyone is welcome ? even losers like me. All I had to do was to make one simple, life-changing decision.
I've always loved hotels. I love drinking in their bars, I love eating in their restaurants, and above all I love staying in their rooms. Which is lucky as, for much of my childhood, that's how I lived.
My parents have been hoteliers for their entire career ? some 80 years, combined. The day after I was born they carried me, in a little basket, back to their suite at the King Malcolm Hotel, Dunfermline, where my dad was the manager. I spent my first Christmas in a hotel, I ate my first solid food in a hotel restaurant and I drank my first Diet Coke (not entirely legally, I suspect) in a hotel bar. Before speaking my first word, I dialled nine for an outside line. It's perhaps unsurprising, then, that I've always felt more comfortable in hotels than I do living in a house.
It's also perhaps unsurprising that, when I found myself nearing 30, feeling stuck in a rut and craving one last burst of youthful irresponsibility, my first thought was to run back to the world of hotels.
Specifically, the idea I had was to give up my flat, pack a few possessions into a suitcase and embark on a year-long experiment. Rather than renewing my lease for another year, I'd spend that year on the road ? exploring whether it was possible to live in nice hotels in other cities for the same cost as surviving on cold pizza in my small flat in London.
The idea isn't entirely without precedent. Lots of travelling salesmen live in hotels for extended periods ? spending most of the year shuttling from Holiday Inn to Hilton, surviving on room service and takeaways and missing their (ex-)wife and kids. But they live that way out of necessity rather than choice.
My theory was that if you do it through choice, on your own terms, living in hotels ? as a kind of high-class nomad ? could actually be a practical and luxurious alternative to home. And history agrees with me?
America in the mid-1800s was growing rapidly, with hundreds of new towns and cities springing up every year. As each new town was founded, one of the first buildings to be erected was usually a hotel, to provide essential accommodation for new inhabitants. What started out as a temporary housing solution soon became established as a permanent way to live for many of those early city dwellers. It made sense: even for the relatively well off, the cost of buying a family home and employing servants to run it was prohibitive. A good hotel provided all the comforts of a luxury home ? complete with porters, cooks and maids ? at a far more affordable cost. Why not make that hotel your home?
The idea took off, and by 1844 a Chicago census found that one in six of the city's residents was living permanently in hotels. In New York the number was even higher ? according to AK Sandoval-Strausz's book Hotel: An American History, in 1856 nearly three-quarters of the city's middle and upper classes gave a hotel as their primary address.
If history was on my side, then so was my own experience. Through seeing my parents at work, I know how hotels operate. A hotel bedroom is a highly perishable commodity ? if it hasn't been sold by the end of the day, it's gone forever. I know the times of the year when rooms are hardest to sell and, as a result, when bargain rates are there for the taking. In most cities the first couple of months of the year are slow, so I knew I'd find some good deals on rooms in New York as long as I didn't stay much beyond the middle of March. After that I could head to second-tier cities, or even small towns, where cheaper rooms are available all year round.
I also know that the longer you stay in a hotel, the better the deals get. Hotels love long-staying guests: not only are those guests filling a room for a month or longer, but they're also very likely to use other hotel services like laundry and room service and the bar. For all these reasons, there isn't a hotel on the planet that won't give you a decent discount for a long stay. You don't even have to haggle: just ask. One little-known but extraordinarily useful fact is that in most cities you don't pay local tax (10?15% in most US cities) on stays for more than 30 nights. In the UK, stays of more than 28 nights are VAT free.
Armed with just this basic information ? and a willingness to learn more as I travelled ? I was confident that living in hotels was a perfectly feasible way to spend a year.
Wednesday, 20 February 2008. I had booked into the Pod hotel on East 51st Street for a month. I really like staying at the Pod: not only is it centrally located but it's inexpensive in the off season and has flat-screen TVs, iPod docks, rainhead showers and free Wi-Fi. And for all of those reasons it's incredibly popular with young foreign travellers, making the place one giant pick-up joint.
With just a couple of emails to their reservations department, I'd managed to negotiate a double room for $89 a night ? less than �45. I'd decided to set my accommodation budget at �50-�100 per night, about equal to the amount I'd be paying to stay in London if I'd accepted the increase in rent. The numbers looked good. Which was good, as I was past the point of no return: the last thing I'd done before going through to departures was to drop the key to my flat in the post to my (former) landlady along with a letter, politely but firmly telling her where to stick her rent hike.
The final plan I'd made, in the cab to the hotel, was to cut down on drinking for a while. London had given my liver a thrashing.
I remember checking into the hotel and putting my bag in my room. I remember having a shower and changing my shirt. I remember deciding to head out for a walk to orientate myself ? to get a feel for where the local dry cleaners and restaurants and bars could be found. I remember ? ah, here we go, yes ? I remember finding an Irish pub that looked friendly, Something O'Something's, and I remember noticing the pretty brunette with the ponytail wearing a CUNY sweatshirt and sitting on her own. She was reading Down and Out in Paris and London, which I remember I'd used as my opening line. "I've always found the Rough Guides to be more reliable than Orwell?"
I shook my head, hoping it would hasten the return if not of my memory then at least of the rest of my vision. I had a dim recollection of a bottle of wine and a conversation about how she was studying contemporary world literature. I'm pretty sure we left the Irish bar and went to another place down the street where her friends were celebrating ? what? ? something. There was a bottle of champagne. But after that ? nothing. I can't remember how I got back to the Pod. And I have absolutely no idea what possible set of circumstances led to my being slumped on the floor, head leaning against the closed door of my room.
I shook my head again and slowly I started to focus on how long my hotel room was. And narrow. Weird.
And that's when I realised the first of my two problems. I was slumped against my hotel room ? I had that right ? but rather than being inside the room, I was outside, in the corridor. The second of my problems ? and certainly the most pressing ? was that I was stark naked.
I tried the door. Locked, obviously. I gave it a half-hearted shove with my shoulder and immediately fell back down to the floor, still drunk.
I had no other option: I'd have to go down to the lobby and ask someone to let me in. My only lucky break was that I'd been given a room right opposite the lifts. I pressed the call button and the door opened straight away, which was good ? it meant less time in the corridor ? but also potentially bad, as it meant someone had evidently arrived at my floor not long before.
Finally the doors opened and I peered out into the lobby, trying my best to keep the rest of my body out of sight. All was calm and still, thank God; the clock behind the reception desk said 4.25am. The only witness to my humiliation would be a solitary night porter sitting behind the reception desk, reading a magazine.
"Ay Dios m�o!"
And a tiny Hispanic cleaner, mopping the floor right next to the lift. I hadn't noticed her.
"Lo siento," I said. My two words of Spanish.
"Don't worry, Maria, I'll go," said the night porter, looking up bored from his magazine. It was an interesting choice of words: "I'll go", as if this kind of thing ? naked men walking out of the lifts at four in the morning ? happened at the Pod every night. He picked up a master key from behind the desk and ambled towards the elevator.
"Sorry about this," I said.
He didn't say a word.
A few hours later ? 11am ? I woke up in my hotel bed and, for a few blissful minutes, I completely forgot about my naked elevator adventure. And then the first flashback came.
There was no other mature course of action; I had to get out of there. There was simply no way I could face another 30 nights in the same hotel, with the same night porter and the same small Hispanic cleaner.
A significant advantage of hotel stays over apartment rental contracts is that they're easy to renegotiate or cancel. Most hotels insist that you give 24 ? or occasionally 48 ? hours' notice if you decide to leave early. If you can't give notice ? say, because you hadn't planned on waking up naked in a corridor ? then you're still free to leave early, but they will usually charge you for the notice period. But that's all they'll make you pay. Some will try to insist on a small "early check-out" penalty, but the trick to getting rid of those is to be extremely apologetic, and to make it abundantly clear that you're looking forward to coming back to the hotel in future.
That last part was a lie, obviously ? I knew I could never set foot in the place again.
? This is an edited extract from Paul Carr's latest book, The Upgrade, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson at �12.99
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2011/may/22/travel-living-in-hotels-paul-carr
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