How Budget Hotels Deliver Us into Liminal States

The lobbies of mass-produced hotel chains strive to make us feel that we belong there, if only for the fifteen minutes it takes to make small talk with the clerk, transact a credit card, and secure a room key. After that, these anonymous way stations for weary travelers take an ax straight to the throat of déjà vu. Yes, you have been here before. But no, not in the same way. But then, is the back-and-forth argument inside your head even worth the bother? No.

Hotel chains are the bane of anyone who values the unique spirit of unique interior spaces. Hotel chains look charm, warmth, and character straight in the eye, then annihilate all three. This is not a complaint. It is a simple fact for anyone traveling on a budget. We should be grateful that the hotel chain radiates cold anonymity. Otherwise, we might never muster enough enthusiasm to get back home.

Airbnb made billions on the (correct, mostly) presumption that people crave the cozy, or that we are starved for cozy. We should prefer the warmth of relaxing in someone’s home, or at least their rental property, to the frigid waters and desperate attempts of making ourselves comfortable in a bed wedged between wallpaper that has not been updated since 1980 and a particleboard nightstand hosting a Gideon Bible and ten-year-old Yellow Pages. Only a masochist would choose the latter.

The problem is, charm and coziness have their costs. And increasingly, the poor and middle classes are revolting to preserve the charms of their homes and hometowns, lest the rich of the world consume every last drop of coziness for themselves during vacation time, crowding everyone else out, or at least to outlying suburbs that are more affordable. Ambience, charm, and yes, coziness, are fast becoming commodities to the highest bidder, much like the already insane costs of rent and buying a home. Locals in Spain and Italy have taken to brandishing high-powered water guns at tourists with money to burn. Hoarders of coziness, beware. You who would have ambience all to yourself, with none left for anyone else, take note.

And so the cramped cookie-cutter rooms of the hotel and motel chain call to us in their cramped, crinkled voice of commercial appeal. Who would not want to contemplate the fact that, instead of a designer bed next to a Mies van der Rohe replica chair, they could instead occupy a room once filled with the sobs of a battered wife or estranged husband kicked out of the house, the cries and whispers of a long-forgotten tryst, or the crass jokes of beer-swilling fraternity bros on a road trip?

Where mass-produced hotel chains are concerned, the name of the game has never been charm and coziness, but the liminal state of knowing you will be sleeping in a room soaked in the residue of countless souls before making your mark as the 7,091st person to spit toothpaste in its bathroom sink. There is no use pretending you are someone special when, in fact, you are just another person passing through. So look hard at that tacky framed print on the wall. Heft your Gideon Bible. Scrape your bare feet over the wiry carpet. Turn on the TV screen lodged just two feet from the edge of your bed. Tune out, and join the thousands of invisible hands of everyone before you who also felt alien, alone, or maybe even a little bit alive in that same room.

Coziness is not only expensive. It is also, increasingly, the domain of the traveler too cowardly to feel their souls challenged.