When I was a young airline pilot and new to ‘the road’ I ranked hotels by their proximity to good food and entertainment. Now, I judge hotels on two things: internet speed and shower pressure.
Oh, and free breakfast.
I’m not even a breakfast guy. But when it’s free – I’m a kid in a carb-filled candy store. I pirouette around the kids begging their parents for another ‘home-made’ waffle with my tray of stale bagels, English muffins and knock-off Cheerios (Crunchy O’s, for the record). I feel like a malnourished Fred Astaire with a bowl of generic biscuits and gravy dancing to CNN Headline News.
Some hotel meals are better than others. Some are simply offering something so they can entice the road warriors. This way they can add another checkmark on Hotels.com along with “In-room safe” and “Fitness Room”.
I stayed at a hotel once that had a bagged loaf of bread next to a toaster with a tub of butter and a communal jar of jelly by its side. Jelly is so much more filling when a knife full has bread crumbs and chunks of butter from the last freeloader mixed in. But hey, it was free and I passed the solitary knife to the pilot to my left when I was done and recognized the Stockholm Syndrome look in his eyes. I said, “Here you go Patty Hearst.”
People who aren’t in the industry always assume our life is like a vacation won on Price Is Right. “Oh, you’re going to Chicago?! You need to go downtown and have a pizza at Gino’s East and then take a stroll down the famed Magnificent Mile.”
Let me tell you what that involves. First of all… we often don’t have that much time. Often twelve hours in the hotel in which some of that should be for legitimate rest. So let’s say four hours in the hotel. Subtract getting ready in the morning and washing the funk from the airplane off you when you get to the room. Two hours remain. We typically stay near the airport which is rarely near anything unique to that city. So now it’s a cab ride for this pizza… a roundtrip cab ride that’s thirty minutes each way. We’re looking at a fifty dollar pizza that has to be sucked down so you can get back to the hotel in order to wake up early enough to enjoy free breakfast in the morning.
Typically dinner is at another American chain restaurant that is within walking distance to the hotel. And regardless what State we are in, we can look out the window of that restaurant and see a Bed Bath and Beyond, a Walmart or a Home Depot. “Anytown USA”. These restaurantvilles are the evolution of the truck stop. And before that they were the saloons the Pony Express riders would stop in to share stories from the road.
“Oh, you’re riding west through the Nebraska Territory? Don’t stop in Omaha. They don’t have free breakfast.”