15 ms·

Staying in hotels during solo travel is so remarkably effective at depressing me in ways I didn't know were possible (and I mean real, deep, prolonged feelings

Staying in hotels during solo travel is so remarkably effective at depressing me in ways I didn't know were possible (and I mean real, deep, prolonged feelings of existential loneliness and dread that eat at my core), that I just can't advocate staying at them. Obviously there are hostels at the other end of the scale when traveling for pure personal joy, but they aren't for everyone. AirBNB used to fill the midpoint in a way that was fairly difficult to do otherwise. It's a shame it became what it became. I only had good experiences back in ~2016-17.

tonyarkles 6y ago
My very first night in Europe was spent in an AirBNB in Paris (2011, I think?). It was an upstairs suite in a house in one of the suburbs. At about 8am, there was a gentle quiet knock on the door; I open it up, and a 6-year-old girl asks me, in French, “would you like eggs?” I tell her I would, and she runs off and comes back with two eggs on buttered toast. They were delicious. This was the very first night of solo travel for me, and it changed the day from starting out anxious (Where’s the subway? Where am I going to find food? What if I get lost?!) to starting out with a fresh cup of coffee and some delicious breakfast. Could you get a similar experience in a hotel? Sort of. There’s usually a restaurant where you could get breakfast, but I don’t think you’re usually going to get this feeling of “someone actually cares”.
noirbot 6y ago
I think it does still fill something like that mid-point if you're staying with a host instead of renting your own private space. I haven't generally had social hosts most of the times I was staying with airbnb, but I'm also fairly anti-social myself, but even just this last year, I was up in Buffalo NY for an event and ended up asking my host where to go for dinner, which turned into us hanging out the next day because he was starting his own brewery and wanted to share some of his homebrew. Even without something like that, for me, a lot of the value isn't even in interacting with a host as much as it is the feeling of sharing a lived-in space with someone. Small bits of personal decor, or looking through what random DVDs they have on the shelf provides some warmth that a chain hotel never will. It's a bit trite, but I think you can often tell the hosts that really care about providing a good experience from how they describe the rental, as well as looking at the actual decor and the space you're renting.

tonyarkles 6y ago

My very first night in Europe was spent in an AirBNB in Paris (2011, I think?). It was an upstairs suite in a house in one of the suburbs. At about 8am, there was a gentle quiet knock on the door; I open it up, and a 6-year-old girl asks me, in French, “would you like eggs?” I tell her I would, and she runs off and comes back with two eggs on buttered toast. They were delicious. This was the very first night of solo travel for me, and it changed the day from starting out anxious (Where’s the subway? Where am I going to find food? What if I get lost?!) to starting out with a fresh cup of coffee and some delicious breakfast. Could you get a similar experience in a hotel? Sort of. There’s usually a restaurant where you could get breakfast, but I don’t think you’re usually going to get this feeling of “someone actually cares”.

noirbot 6y ago

I think it does still fill something like that mid-point if you're staying with a host instead of renting your own private space. I haven't generally had social hosts most of the times I was staying with airbnb, but I'm also fairly anti-social myself, but even just this last year, I was up in Buffalo NY for an event and ended up asking my host where to go for dinner, which turned into us hanging out the next day because he was starting his own brewery and wanted to share some of his homebrew. Even without something like that, for me, a lot of the value isn't even in interacting with a host as much as it is the feeling of sharing a lived-in space with someone. Small bits of personal decor, or looking through what random DVDs they have on the shelf provides some warmth that a chain hotel never will. It's a bit trite, but I think you can often tell the hosts that really care about providing a good experience from how they describe the rental, as well as looking at the actual decor and the space you're renting.