Good Hotels are fun. What makes a good hotel?

 

The Paradox Hotel in Vancouver.

I love staying at nice hotels. As an advertising person in a past life, one of my clients was the Austin Raddison Hotel and another was the Austin Four Seasons Hotel. They spoiled me. 

My biggest benchmarks for a good hotel are: very clean rooms, very comfortable beds, very, very quiet rooms and hallways, prompt room service, congenial staff, a concierge with great knowledge of local treasures like interesting, independent restaurants, small galleries, interesting clothes shops, etc. And...relative affordability --- which is highly contextual.

We spent our previous week at the Paradox Hotel in Vancouver. It's a five star hotel that hit the target in every one of my categories but its most outstanding feature was the almost dead quiet hallways and rooms. Someone paid attention to the room designs and basic sound abatement. But the thing that helped most was that each of the upper floors had only 6 or 8 guest rooms on it and, by their own admission, the booking staff tried to spread out guests over many floors where possible to create sound buffers. 

For someone with a heightened level of pervasive, general anxiety the calm and quiet in a room is conducive to relaxing and also getting a better night's sleep. Nothing is as grating, to me at any rate, than two loud and half drunk men carrying on a loud (outside voices) conversation while walking from the elevators and past your room at two or three in the morning. 

Our trip was during the "off season" so the hotel wasn't at max occupancy and I'm sure that helped a lot. 

The hotel is in the middle of the best part of downtown, bordered by Georgia St. on one side and Alberni on the other. The side streets are Thurlow and Bute. It's a five minute walk to one seawall and a ten to fifteen minute walk to the opposite side; to the other seawall. There are five or more coffee shops/donut repositories within eyesight of the property and a great restaurant which serves a fabulous breakfast one block away. That restaurant is called "Tableau" and is attached on one side to the Loden Hotel --- which also looks to be great. 

While the Paradox is a five star hotel it is nowhere near as tony and expensive as the downtown Fairmont Hotel which is a hotel enthusiast's dream. A magnificent old building, grand and soaring public spaces, great art in the lobbies, and, I can only imagine, really great rooms. It would be a splurge but next time up to Vancouver I hope to spend at least one night experiencing it. 

In my travels as a working photographer I've stayed in a huge range of hotels. From The Breakers in West Palm Beach to a run down, no name motel in a tiny town in rural Indiana. In every instance I would much prefer the former to the later. But sometimes a destination will be so sparsely populated and so far off the map that you have one choice. On several occasions I traveled to construction projects that were so far off the maps that the only hospitality was bedding down in the back of the rental SUV. Not optimal...

B. knows that I don't care much about how we fly. Sure, Economy + or Biz class is always a treat but the plane gets to the destination at the same time no matter the cost of the seats. But if we're going to treat ourselves to a fun vacation the real priority is always the hotel. Why scrimp? I'd like my temporary environment to be at least as nice as my own home....

Just a note about photography: I was the only person in any of the hotels we stepped into who had a camera with them. No other visitors seemed to have any interest in taking photographs. None at all. 

And, a well rested and well cared for photographer takes better photos... sometimes.