How we pick the right hotel, not the loudest one
The most-photographed property in a destination is almost never the one we book. Here is the internal checklist we actually run.
There is a category of hotel that exists to be photographed and a category that exists to be slept in. They overlap less than the marketing suggests. Our shortlist starts with a boring question: how far is it from the thing you came for, at the hour you'll want to go?
A cliffside room forty minutes from the reef means you snorkel at eleven with everyone else instead of at seven alone. We will trade two categories of luxury for twenty minutes of proximity almost every time, and we'll tell you when we're doing it.
“The permit buys you a morning. Everything else you do buys you the odds that the morning is the one you'll talk about for ten years.”
Second filter: does the property employ locally at the senior level, or only at the housekeeping level? It correlates suspiciously well with whether the food is any good and whether the guides know anything.
Third: we call. Not the booking line, the property itself. If the person answering can tell us what the light does at the pool in October, we're interested. If they read us a rate sheet, we're not.
Writes for The Passage about the parts of a trip that don't fit in a brochure. Available to design yours.