Alex Robertson Textor

Review: Travelodge Central Southwark, London

This spring, I received an invitation to stay at a Travelodge. The chain is in refurbishment mode. The key element here is a new king-size bed, but there is a new color scheme to consider as well. After the tiniest bit of deliberation I selected a weekend evening in June when we had houseguests. So in the evening, after making dinner for our houseguests, we walked the half-mile to the Travelodge Central Southwark and checked in. 

Budget-category Travelodge is one of the top UK hotel chains, with over 500 properties in the UK and Ireland.  A little grandstand of a detour to start. It’s a pity that there are so few rigorous reviews of low-cost (and in particular low-cost chain) hotels. Cheap hotels come in all sorts of different forms, some wretched, others absolutely lovely. It’s a mistake to think that inexpensive hotels don’t deserve attention. Every hotel deserves an evaluative scheme no matter the price-point. The key is to develop an appropriate metric for the hotel in question.

With a budget chain like Travelodge, the key is quite straightforward. Is the hotel appealing? Does it have an aesthetic that is warm and welcoming versus stultifyingly generic? And is it worth the nightly rate?

The Travelodge revamp is in fact quite appealing. The beds are king-size and comfortable and the duvets are fluffy. The colors are understated – a warm blue on the walls, a gray, rust, and blue striped blanket motif repeated on window curtains. Bed units and desks match, in a modern wood laminate. Blue floor carpet is patterned. Room chairs capture the blue and red of the overall pattern.

Bathrooms are nothing unusual, though the absence of toiletries of any sort (barring one tiny bar of soap, perched on top of two plastic cups) is notable. This trick, which I associate more with hostels than hotels, obviously saves money. But I wonder how much it would cost to install a wall-mounted liquid soap dispenser.

The fact is that mine was a pleasing room. Perhaps it’s just the newness of the scheme, but this was a warm and inviting room with, most crucially, a very comfortable bed.

Over breakfast (not included in the nightly rate, and nothing to write home about either) we tried to come up with a way to describe our night away, a mere half-mile from home. We came up with “mini-venture.”

Most crucially there’s the matter of nightly rate. I booked a room at the same hotel in late July, with a week’s advance notice, for a relative. It cost £120 for the night with just a week’s lead-time.

I asked the very nice publicist who set up my stay to talk to Travelodge about the hotel’s nightly rate. I was told that the starting rate is £39. Travelodge was unwilling to offer any additional rate range. So I researched rates over the next six months. I didn’t find any £39 rates, but I did find some £49 nights, as well as a handful of £100+ nightly rates.

Viewed on its own terms, the new Travelodge is a fine product, but I wouldn’t want to pay more than £75 for a night at a Travelodge in London. And I'd try to remember to bring shampoo.

Lo Bleu Hotel on the 101 Holidays Blog

Check out a tiny review of one of my favorite Caribbean hotels, Lô Bleu Hotel on Guadeloupe's Terre-de-Haut, on the 101 Holidays Blog.

British Elle on Hip Hostels

OK, I'm now officially blaming August for Spendthrift Shoestring's dreadful drop-off in posts. I've got several Nordic adventure posts on deck yet have been, apparently, unable to summon the energy to edit and post them. They are forthcoming. I swear.

Meanwhile, the September British Elle made its way to Fort Greene last week courtesy of a houseguest in from London. (Spoiler for those with unread copies of the issue lying around: cover girl Lindsay Lohan is troubled!) I was interested in the uncredited feature on stylish hostels deep into the magazine (pp 346-7). Five hostels are reviewed, and the least expensive of these is Gyreum in Sligo, where the cheapest double is just €34. The article closes with a plug for hostel booking giant Hostelworld.

Happily, the global recession has brought with it a lot of features like these. I love them. I wish magazine editors would take the next step and begin to extol the coolness of creative, independent, budget-friendly travel on a regular basis. Reduced glorification of the aspirational model of travel would be a good thing all around.

Budget Hotels: Ever More Popular

The age of the budget hotel is upon us. Today's Global Traveller special report in the FT includes a column by Alan Parker, chief executive of the Whitbread Group. Premier Inn, the UK's largest hotel chain, is owned by Whitbread.

Parker observes general growth in "budget" brands and services, which includes:

...the phenomenal growth seen by the budget hotel sector in recent years. The number of rooms has more than doubled, from 40,000 to 90,000, in the UK since 2000 alone. Indeed, the sector now accounts for two-thirds of the annual growth within the UK hospitality industry. What's more, occupancy and revenues are growing fastest at the budget end of the market.

Yet there remains huge potential for additional growth.

The branded budget market is still relatively under-represented in the UK, with a 13 per cent share compared to 23 per cent in France and 25 per cent in the US, both more established markets. There is clearly room for more.

And this room for growth has many components. Tough economic times are driving business travelers to stay at budget-friendly hotels. The mass cultural turn toward travel bargains—which continues to fuel the market for low-cost air travel—remains strong. The future is rosy for budget hotels.

Bristol Hotel, Frankfurt

I spent Sunday night at the Bristol Hotel in Frankfurt, a property I found on the Tablet Hotels site. I've never used Tablet Hotels to find a hotel before; the site's listings tend to stretch far beyond my budget. But I was intrigued by the boutique hotel with a "small" single room for just €70 per night, and I booked a room.

I'm so glad I did. After a week of very simple, budget accommodations in the Balkans, Bristol was just what the doctor ordered. My room was big enough, done in a crisp black and white aesthetic, and boasted free Wi-Fi. There's also a fantastic breakfast spread. The jam selection alone is worth a mention. Location-wise, Bristol is also a winner, just a few blocks from the main train station.

A little style, a nice breakfast, a good bed, an ideal location, and friendly staff for €70. I understand that for some of my readers, €70 isn't cheap for a night in a hotel; that acknowledged, in the context of the extortionate nightly rates charged for hotels of far lower quality across Europe, Bristol represents an awfully good value.

Grand Tours, Kosovo, & Macedonia

It was exciting to see the Frugal Traveler's Grand Tour series round-up in the New York Times yesterday. Matt Gross emerges from his mammoth zig-zag across Europe with some great tips. He proselytizes the following budget gospel: choosing apartment rentals over hotels; shopping for food at supermarkets; signing up for volunteer opportunities; journeying by bus; hitchhiking; and, finally and most delightfully, exploring Europe's outer edges. This is just about the best single how-to article I've seen in the NYT travel section in quite some time. It's full of practical information and is also downright inspiring.

I suspect that I was especially excited to see the above article in light of my very exciting—and very frugal—upcoming trip, which kicks off tomorrow. I'll spend a few days in Haiger, in the German state of Hesse, meeting some mostly distant relatives. That won't really be the frugal part though. Keep reading.

After the family reunion extravaganza, I'll head south. I'll fly Germanwings to Pristina (€150 one-way). From there I'll move on to Ohrid, Prilep, and Skopje before flying back to Germany from Thessaloniki (on Air Berlin, for €100.) The most expensive hotel among the bunch will run €60 for a double, and the cheapest (in the bunk room of a monastery) will cost nothing at all. My hotel in Pristina will set me back €9 for the night; my guesthouse in Ohrid will run €12.50 per night per person.

Macedonia, a country I visited for the first time last summer, is a budget traveler's paradise. In the next multi-installment counterintuitive European Grand Tour Reconsidered feature, in say 2009, it should really be covered.

Happily, I've picked up some assignments for my own trip, and will link when appropriate.

Over and out.

London: Visiting Hotels

I've spent many weekdays over the last few weeks visiting and reviewing hotels in London for EuroCheapo. I've visited and reviewed hotels for the site in ten cities. In chronological order, they are: Dublin, Stockholm, Berlin, Munich, Athens, Krakow, Bratislava, Barcelona, Amsterdam, and now London.

Visiting hotels for the purpose of reviewing them is, frankly, a fascinating experience. In addition to figuring out which hotels in the city in question are any good, you learn about the shape of the labor force, various local customs and patterns, and how hotels fit into the tourist economy. You learn very quickly about management styles, and from a range of sources, too: managers, receptionists, and the cleaning staff. It's not always fun to visit and review hotels, but it's always undeniably interesting.

It turns out that reviewing hotels in London is—how shall I put this?—not exactly a walk in the park. I'll save my reflections on dynamics at hand for the EuroCheapo London city guide hotel scene roundup. For now, I'll just share an experience I had at a hotel (nameless for now, though you'll soon be able to read about it here) I visited earlier today. With its decent nightly rates, original style, and personable staff, it fits the bill for EuroCheapo hands down. But what was most remarkable about my experience there was the fact that I was offered a coffee at the close of my visit by the Greek Cypriot manager. He apologetically acknowledged that he was "crap" at making coffee, unless, he brightened up, I wanted a freddo. When in Nicosia, I thought. He made me a freddo and I drank it there in the hotel lounge, happier than I should have been, all the while remembering with great fondness how much caffeine-driven fun I had visiting hotels in Athens.

Vicky Baker's Couchsurfing Adventures

Over the last few months there's been a great series in the Guardian by Vicky Baker, a freelance writer. Ms. Baker is traveling through South and Central America, staying with residents and steeping in local cultures. So far she's visited Ecuador, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana.

The series explains in detail how to get going as a couchsurfing traveler. Reading Baker's articles, it's easy to (1) sense an internal explosion of envy while (2) recognizing the many strengths of the form of travel she advances. Such good stuff.

Servas: No-Cost Accommodations

The weak dollar has prompted emergency newspaper travel section articles suggesting alternative forms of accommodation. All sorts of options, including hostels and apartment rentals, are being floated as ways to deal with the terrifying exchange rate. This is all well and good, but if such options are acceptable when the dollar is tanking, keep in mind how cheap they'll be if (when?) the dollar returns to a less shocking rate of exchange—and keep in mind how cheap they are for people whose currencies are flying high. These alternatives, which cut against the model of aspirational travel that characterizes most U.S. travel magazines, should be a much more established part of the terrain.

There are even cheaper options than hostels and apartment rentals. This past weekend I was reintroduced to a family friend who belongs to Servas, a hosting service that pairs travelers with hosts. Servas understands itself as a peace organization devoted to the goal of bringing people from different cultures together. The organization has a pretty extensive list of hosts in many countries; these hosts are expected to spend some time with travelers, introduce them to their locales, and ideally eat dinner together. Joining Servas is not expensive.

Servas isn't for everyone, but for those who crave a little local contact and an insider's introduction to a culture, it's a great no-cost accommodation option.

Airport Inn, Piarco

Before I get completely sidetracked, I want to get in a quick post on Airport Inn in Piarco, Trinidad. Getting to Carriacou from New York required two plane changes—one in Trinidad and one in Grenada. We opted to overnight both coming and going in Trinidad. Because Port of Spain is quite a haul from the Trinidad airport and in light of our inbound itinerary (an evening arrival into Trinidad and a very early departure to Carriacou the next day) we researched hotels in the immediate vicinity of the airport.

We were lucky to come up with Airport Inn. Doubles run $90 (singles $70 and triples $105) and the rate includes airport transfer and breakfast. The inn is run by Sita Singh, a very friendly tourism industry veteran who is happy to share Trinidad tips and information. Rooms are super spotless, and the airport is a three-minute drive away. The route to the airport is even walkable, though the road wasn't designed with pedestrians in mind.

I'd recommend Airport Inn to anyone with an early morning flight from Piarco.