by Paul Carr
In most other cases, though, paying up front is a terrible idea. You just never know when you’ll need to escape.
I finally found my jeans thrown on a shelf – interesting – along with one of my shoes. The second shoe, it turned out, was hiding in the shower, along with my shirt and coat. I took some comfort from this as, firstly, it meant I’d obviously arrived back at the hotel fully clothed, and, secondly, because I was only travelling with one pair of shoes.
I quickly pulled on the jeans and shoes – my socks were apparently lost for ever – and swapped the shirt for a clean one from my suitcase. I hadn’t even unpacked.
There was also no way I was going to go to reception to check out: the night porter would certainly have told the morning shift about the naked man from room 625. Instead, I grabbed my suitcase, took the elevator to the lobby – another juddering flashback – and, just before the doors opened, began talking into my mobile phone as if I was in the middle of a very important call. No one stops you when you’re on the phone.
I walked straight through the lobby, past the reception desk and out on to the street, inhaling the exhaust fumes and food smells of freedom.
I didn’t stop walking until I was three blocks from the hotel, where I found another Irish pub, this one with a wooden board outside boasting free wifi Internet access. I stood in the doorway for a moment and looked around – trying to remember if it was the same bar I’d been in the night before. No plastic leprechaun – good. I ordered half a beer – hair of the dog, that’s all – and found a table in the corner. Opening my laptop I started to write an email …
From: Paul Carr
To: The Pod Hotel (Reservations)
Dear Sir,
I am currently checked into room 625 for a one-month stay. Unfortunately I have had to leave early on urgent business and so will no longer need the room. Please debit my card for the cost of my stay to date. I understand you have a 24-hour cancellation policy, so please feel free to charge me for one additional night.
Please accept my sincere apologies for any inconvenience, and I look forward to returning to the Pod soon.
Paul Carr
That last part was a lie, obviously – I could never set foot in the place again – but by acting like a potential future guest I knew there was less chance they’d try to charge me for the cancelled nights. Sure enough, when I checked my online bank statement a few weeks later, I found they hadn’t even charged me for the extra twenty-four hours.
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The email having been sent, all I had to do was find a new hotel, something that the Internet has made ridiculously easy, but also annoyingly absorbing. It’s far too easy to spend hours comparing features and reviews and rates, when in fact the only questions that need to be answered are:
Are the rooms nice?
Is it near to where I need to be?
Does it have decent Internet access, not just in the public areas but in the actual rooms?
Are the online reviews from other guests favourable, particularly when it comes to the service?
Some people like a gym too.*
I took another drag from my beer to steady my hand for the task ahead. I could feel my hangover catching up with me – the last of the previous night’s alcohol was leaving my system and I knew I’d either have to order a second beer or surrender to the worsening sickness.
Just one more.
I fired up Trip Advisor† – my go-to hotel review site, and ran a quick search for the highest rated hotels in Manhattan. I never look at the mid-range chain hotels – the four-star Marriotts, the Hiltons, the Sheratons – they’re usually very nice, but they’re also exactly the same in every city on earth. Since my parents moved from managing chain hotels to owning an independent one, my loyalties have moved the same way. I’ve got as tired of cookie-cutter experiences as they have.*
Unless I already have a favorite hotel in a city, or a personal recommendation from someone I trust, Trip Advisor is indispensable. The site lists about half a million hotels, with more than thirty million reviews written by actual guests. Hotel sites generally use their own arbitrary ratings systems rather than anything official or internationally recognised, but anything with an average rating of less than four out of five on Trip Advisor is likely to be a dump in any language.
After the first batch of results came up, it was time to filter them based on price. Trip Advisor doesn’t sell rooms itself; it just links to the major price-comparison sites. Some people swear by sites like Priceline which promise deep discounts on upscale hotels, as long as you don’t mind them picking the hotel for you. It’s only after you’ve confirmed the room – and agreed to pay for it – that you actually find out where you’re staying. That idea has never appealed to me: not only are there too many unknowns but you have to pay up front.
I clicked on a few links.
With my budget of $100 a night, I ignored anywhere that was advertising a rate less than $75. With this hangover, I deserved better than a budget hotel in a shitty part of town. Had I been staying less than a couple of weeks I would also have ignored anywhere over $150 a night – but I still had twenty-seven days left in New York so I at least had a shot at some deep discounting. I eventually settled on a shortlist of three likely places – a process that would normally take me about ten minutes, but with my monstrous hangover took me the best part of forty-five. And one and a half beers.
Then it was time to make some calls.
When my friends ask me for advice on scoring cheap hotel rooms, I always tell them that, once they have their shortlist, the first thing to do is call the hotel’s reservations department. I coach them to explain that a friend has recommended the hotel as the best place in town but that they’re travelling on a budget and were wondering if anything can be done with the rate advertised online? Hotel booking sites act much like travel agents – with hotels paying anything up to 15 per cent commission on any booking you make through them. If they can get you to book directly then they can afford to knock almost all of that commission off the price of the room and still come out ahead. The phone operators in big chain hotels don’t usually have the leeway to make those decisions, but most independent places do. And they gladly will; people who book direct rather than through agencies are much more likely to become repeat guests.
The trick is to emphasise that you don’t mind a bad room. Every hotel has rooms that are tough to sell: rooms that are smaller than the others, rooms with just a shower and no bath, rooms right at the top of the building, only accessible by stairs. These are the ones that usually end up on the anonymous hotel sites like Priceline, and these are the rooms that – particularly in independent hotels – are easiest to get discounts on.
Another bonus is that, in almost every case, the person taking your booking is not going to be the person you see at check-in. If the hotel is nice and the price is right, it makes sense to take whatever room you’re offered and then, on check-in, if you’re not happy with the room just stroll down to reception and complain. Politely. Pick something that you couldn’t have known when you booked. The room looks out over the road and you’re a light sleeper. It only has a shower and you’re sure that on their website a bath was mentioned.* If one of the fixtures in the room – the shower, the sink, the bed – is broken, you’re golden. ‘Is there any chance of getting a different room? Sorry to be difficult …’ Nine times out of ten they’ll upgrade you on the spot, or at least give you a nicer room in the same class. It’s something every receptionist is empowered to do, no one has ever got fired for, and is far less hassle for them than arguing with you. And if you’re still not happy, you can always check out the next morning and go somewhere else.
That’s the advice I give to my friends, but this is as good a time as any to admit that it isn’t the approach I always take. Sometimes I have my heart set on a particular hotel but the reservations department won’t budge on price; maybe there’s a big conference in town and everywhere else is full; maybe I’m jus
t unlucky. It happens. In those cases, I have an absolutely foolproof plan B. And by foolproof, I mean it has never, ever, failed.
I play the press card.
Most upscale hotels employ a person whose sole job is to encourage journalists to say nice things about them. In large hotel chains, this person probably works in-house and is called Director of Marketing. For smaller chains and independents, the job is usually outsourced to a PR agency. As an occasionally published writer, and one who feels no shame in exploiting the fact for fun and profit, it usually just takes a quick email to the press office to get results …
From: Paul Carr
To: Any press office, anywhere
Hi, my name is Paul Carr. I write for [name of British newspaper – they never check] and I’m going to be in town for [x] days, starting from [date]. I’ve heard great things about [name of hotel] and I wondered what your media rate is for those dates? I’m happy to take whatever class of room you have …
‘Media rate’: those are the key words. Every hotel has one and, depending on how prestigious your publication or how convincing your email, the discount can range anywhere from 10 per cent off the rack rate up to 100 per cent. Even hotels that claim they don’t discount for media, do. The Lanesborough says it doesn’t have a media rate – why would it? It’s the most prestigious hotel in London – and yet it certainly does. In December 2009 it was £350 for a £1000 room.*
The important thing is you’re not asking for a discount, and you’re not asking for a freebie – you’re just enquiring as to what the rate for journalists is for those dates. Asking for a free room is always a bad idea as a) it marks you out as a blagger, and b) hotels tend to expect something in return. Although that can work, too: Zoe was once offered a free room in Manhattan in exchange for doing a book reading for hotel staff.
As far as I know, no hotel has ever actually checked my credentials with a newspaper. At most they might Google my name, find details of the various things I’d written and assume that all was on the level. It helped that I usually was on the level – but I’ve often thought that there’s no reason why non-journalists couldn’t pull off the same blag, if they did it with enough confidence. Of course, I never told my friends that. No sense in killing the golden goose.†
206
The hangover was raging with full force now, my second beer was finished and my laptop was warning me that it had less than 10 per cent power left. It was time to make a final decision. My best bet looked to be the Hotel QT, near Times Square: a boutique hotel, recently refurbished and a couple of steps up the ladder from the Pod. The Trip Advisor reviews were great and they were offering rooms for $139 a night. Oh, and they had a swimming pool in the lobby. Perfect; that’s who I’d call first. I scribbled down the hotel’s reservations number in my notepad: I reckoned the laptop probably only had about five minutes of life left and I wanted to quickly check my email before it died.
The UK is five hours ahead of New York so my inbox already contained a day’s worth of mail from back home.* I scanned quickly down the list – ignoring the usual crap from Amazon and the spammers offering to make me a fortune – and opened the only two that were from people I actually knew. The first was from Robert who wanted to know how New York was treating me. I’d reply to that one later, when I got to the hotel – the naked elevator story demanded more than 8 per cent battery. The second was from my friend Michael and bore the subject line ‘Vegas baby!’ I clicked it open.
From: Michael Smith
To: Paul Carr
Hey mate!
A little bird tells me you’re in New York. I’m at a conference in San Francisco today and I have to be in LA next week for a meeting but I’ve got a couple of days free. According to Facebook, Michelle is heading to Vegas tomorrow for her 30th birthday – was thinking of joining her. You in? Should be fun.
M.
Fun is the right word. Michael is one of my favourite people to party with. The founder of a string of multi-million-dollar businesses, he’s hugely successful by any metric you care to use. But he’s also the living embodiment of the phrase ‘work hard and play hard’. A constant fixture on London’s lists of ‘most eligible bachelors’, he also has a way with the ladies that makes him the ideal wingman for adventures with the opposite sex.*
Michelle too is always good for adventures – she’s been friends with Michael and me for years and, as we’d both already had brief – very brief – romantic encounters with her, any odd sexual tension was long consigned to the past, allowing her to become an honorary guy for the purposes of wingmanship. Girls, we discovered, are less likely to be wary of men who are out with female friends.
Still, tempting as it was to join the two of them in Vegas, there was still no way I was ‘in’. The whole point of my grand experiment in nomadic living was not to spend any more money than I would in London, both in terms of accommodation and also general cost of living. Assuming I managed to stick to that budget, I’d easily be able to pay my way with regular freelance gigs. I really couldn’t justify any additional expenditure – including a flight to Vegas – this early in the trip, unless I could find some way of offsetting it against a saving somewhere else.
Three per cent battery.
I closed Michael’s email. He’d have to have fun without me. And that’s when I noticed a third email. A one-line message, sent via Facebook, from Michelle.
‘Hey – come to Vegas – I’ve got a room. We’ll share. – Michelle xoxoxo’
Two per cent battery.
A free room for two nights: that would certainly go some way to offsetting the cost of the flight. But there were other considerations too, surely. I mean, I couldn’t just abandon my meticulously detailed travel plans on a whim and fly off to party in Vegas. That would be …
One per cent.
… what’s the word?
Chapter 300
Beer and Togas in Las Vegas
Ridiculous.
‘Fifty-seven men are in court today in Saudi Arabia, arrested on charges of “public flirting” in shopping centers around Mecca.’
The Fox News anchor tried to sound fair and balanced as he read the report, bless him. But it was a ridiculous story, and one that illustrated the gaping chasm – the gulf, even – between Western attitudes and those in the Middle East.
The arrest of fifty-seven people wasn’t funny – not really – but hearing about it on an enormous flatscreen television in Michelle’s room at the Excalibur Hotel, Las Vegas, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
All of the oil money in Saudi Arabia couldn’t afford to build enough prisons to house all of the flirters – and drinkers, and gamblers – in this place. A mecca of decadence and depravity, where even the check-in desks have gambling terminals built into them and drunken women on bachelorette weekends line every corridor, clutching two-foot tall plastic cups of alcoholic slush. Any one of the tiara-wearing, screeching, near-topless harpies I’d run into between reception and the fourth floor of the hotel would have eaten a Saudi flirter for breakfast.
The hotel itself was shaped like a piece of knock-off Disney merchandise. It was supposed to conjure up images of Camelot castle – all red and blue turrets and plastic knights holding injection-moulded swords – and yet, for all the millions they’d obviously spent on branding the place as ‘the Excalibur’, they apparently hadn’t thought to spend $20 on a book about King Arthur’s legend. The hotel’s main restaurant was called ‘the Sherwood Forest’ and the gift shop sold Robin Hood hats.
I should make clear at this point, that, even after receiving Michelle’s message back in New York, I was still planning to phone the Hotel QT and check in for the rest of the month. Really I was. Then I’d decided to have just one more beer – for the road – and, while the bartender was pouring, I’d used the web browser on my BlackBerry to check the cost of flights to Vegas.
Jet Blue Airways was offering a special last-minute deal: a return flight for $120. That meant if I shared Michelle’s
hotel room I could fly to Vegas, stay for two days and then fly back to New York and still be under budget. If anything, it was fiscally irresponsible not to go. Four-beer logic.
301
My flight landed at a little after 1 a.m. Pacific Time – 4 a.m. New York time – and I took a cab straight to the Excalibur, where Michelle was waiting. She’d already been in town for six hours, having flown in from London, via Minneapolis – and yet, despite her jetlag and my hangover, we couldn’t help checking out the hotel casino before sleep.
By 3.30 a.m., after dinner, a nightcap and a failed attempt to beat the slots, we finally made it to the room, where I’d flipped on the TV and started to unpack for the first time since leaving London. All I wanted to do was sleep, but the rest of the hotel was still wide awake, as if it were still the middle of the evening. Children still roamed the corridors, row upon row of bored-looking fat women pumped money into slots and the hen-night girls – those loud, loud girls – seemed like they were just getting started. Sure enough, at 7 a.m. we’d be awoken by them returning to their rooms – happy, drunk and singing Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic’ at the top of their formidable lungs.