The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations (3 page)

Perhaps not Madrid, but maybe New York—I had lots of friends there, and I knew from experience that at this time of year I could negotiate a decent room in Manhattan for $100 a night if I stayed more than a week. At the current exchange rate—almost exactly two dollars to the pound—that was £50 a night. £1400 for the whole of February. The amount was a nice coincidence, actually. £1400 was exactly the same as I’d be paying in total if I agreed on the rent hike in London, when taxes, phone, cable TV and all that stuff were factored in. Stuff that I wouldn’t have to worry about in a hotel.

And, of course, by being out of London for a month, my cost of living would be hugely reduced—so I might actually have a better quality of life, for less money. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a good plan. But why stop at a month? Under the US Visa Waiver Program—which allows Brits
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to enter the US without applying for a formal visa—I could stay in America for up to ninety days.

Maybe I could see a bit of the country—outside Manhattan, hotels would probably be even cheaper. And after that—well, what was the rush to find a new place? There were bound to be hotels in Europe, or even in parts of the UK, where I could stay for less than $100 a night. Really I could travel for as long as I liked: one of the perks of being a freelance writer is that I can pretty much work from anywhere there’s a desk and a decent Wi-Fi connection.
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It was at that exact point, as I took another bite of cold pizza, that somewhere deep inside my brain a synapse fired. Tzzziz.

A whole minute passed, although it seemed longer. I just sat, staring at my laptop, paralyzed by the idea. It seemed so obvious, but at the same time so … what was the word … ? Ridiculous.

A ridiculous adventure.

That settled it.

I’ve always loved hotels. I love drinking in their bars, I love eating in their restaurants and above all I love staying in their rooms. Which is lucky as, for much of my childhood, that’s how I lived.

My parents have been hoteliers for their entire career—some eighty years, combined. The day after I was born, they carried me, in a little basket, back to their suite at the King Malcolm Hotel in Dunfermline, Scotland, where my dad was the manager.

I spent my first Christmas in a hotel, I ate my first solid food in a hotel restaurant and I drank my first Diet Coke (not entirely legally, I suspect) in a hotel bar. Before speaking my first word, I dialed nine for an outside line.

When I was three, my dad’s job took our family to Luton, a town about an hour outside London, where we lived for two years in the penthouse of the Strathmore Hotel. I did my first piece of homework on a hotel dining table and, while other kids’ parents rented McDonald’s restaurants for their birthday parties, my parties were held in the hotel’s ballroom.

In the absence of a back garden, I learned to ride my first bike on the hotel’s flat roof, a mere ten levels above street level. Even during the few years when we actually lived in a proper house, my dad’s long
working hours meant that almost every significant occasion—Christmases, New Years, Easters, birthdays—found us celebrating in a hotel restaurant, surrounded by hundreds of paying guests. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that I’ve always felt more comfortable in hotels than I do living in a house. It’s also perhaps unsurprising that, when I found myself nearing thirty, feeling stuck in a rut and craving one last burst of youthful irresponsibility, my first thought was to run back to the world of hotels.

Specifically, the idea I had—as I took that bite of cold pizza—was to give up my apartment, pack a few possessions into a suitcase and embark on a yearlong experiment. Rather than renewing my lease for another year, I’d spend that year on the road—exploring whether it was possible to live in nice hotels in other cities for the same cost as surviving on cold pizza in my shitty apartment in London.

The idea isn’t entirely without precedent. Lots of traveling salesmen live in hotels for extended periods: spending most of the year shuttling from Holiday Inn to Hilton, surviving on room service and takeaways and missing their (ex-)wife and kids. But they live that way out of necessity, rather than choice. My theory was that, if you do it through choice, on your own terms, living in hotels—as a kind of high-class nomad—could actually be a practical, and luxurious, alternative to home. And history agrees with me …

America in the mid-1800s was growing rapidly, with hundreds of new towns and cities springing up every year. As each new town was founded, one of the first buildings to be erected was usually a hotel, to provide essential accommodation for new inhabitants. What started out as a temporary housing solution soon became established as a permanent way to live for many of those early city-dwellers. It made sense: even for the relatively well off, the cost of buying a family home and employing servants to run it was prohibitive. A good hotel provided all the comforts of a luxury home—complete with porters, cooks
and maids—at a far more affordable cost. Why not make that hotel your home?

The idea took off, and, by 1844, a Chicago census found that one in six of the city’s residents was living permanently in hotels. In New York the number was even higher—according to A. K. Sandoval-Strausz’s book
Hotel: An American History
, in 1856 nearly three-quarters of the city’s middle and upper classes gave a hotel as their primary address. As hotel living became more popular, wealthier occupants began to demand more and more homey facilities—private kitchens so they could hire their own cooks, for example—while those less well off tried to cut costs by turning their backs on daily housekeeping and catered meals.

These demands soon led canny developers to create a new hybrid living space: centrally located properties with many of the communal facilities offered by hotels, but with all of the comforts of a private house. And so the modern apartment building was born.

If history was on my side, then so was my own experience. Through seeing my parents at work, I know how hotels operate. A hotel bedroom is a highly perishable commodity—if it hasn’t been sold by the end of the day, it’s gone forever. I know the times of the year when rooms are hardest to sell and, as a result, when bargain rates are there for the taking. In most cities, the first couple of months of the year are slow so I knew I’d find some good deals on rooms in New York as long as I didn’t stay much beyond the middle of March.

After that I could head to second-tier cities, or even small towns, where cheaper rooms are available all year round. I also know that the longer you stay in a hotel, the better the deals get. Hotels love long-staying guests: not only are those guests filling a room for a month or longer, but they’re also very likely to use other hotel services like laundry and room service and the bar.

For all these reasons, there isn’t a hotel on the planet that won’t give you a decent discount for a long stay. You don’t even have to haggle:
just ask. One little known, but extraordinarily useful, fact is that in most cities you don’t pay local tax (10–15 percent in most US cities) on stays over thirty nights. In the UK, stays over twenty-eight nights are tax-free. Armed with just this basic information—and a willingness to learn more as I traveled—I was confident that living in hotels was a perfectly feasible way to spend a year.

By the end of April I’d have to leave America so I didn’t overstay the visa waiver, but then I could travel around Europe for a bit before heading back to the US once a decent amount of time had elapsed. Friends had told me that, as long as you leave a couple of months between visits, you can pretty much travel back and forth on the visa waiver indefinitely.

Then, by December, I’d head back to London for Christmas and start house hunting in time for January. That would still give me an entire year to figure out what I was going to do with my life before I turned thirty. And if living in hotels didn’t work out? Well, then I’d just come home early.

There’s one more thing you need to know about living in hotels for a year. It’s fucking brilliant. It is also “living the fucking dream.”

These are all things you learn when you start telling your male friends that you’re thinking about doing it.

“That’s a fucking brilliant idea,” said Robert when I told him my plan. “Anyone can live in a hotel for a month. That’s just a long holiday. But living in them for a whole year. That’s living the fucking dream.”

I could see his point. It’s hard to see a downside in spending twelve months in a place where a woman dressed as a maid comes to your
room every morning, delivers fresh towels, recovers the remote control from behind the bed, replenishes the fridge with beer and tiny tubes of Pringles and leaves a mint on your pillow.

A place with a bar and restaurant downstairs, and a uniformed man whose whole purpose is to get you things that you ask for, and to call you “sir.” Oh, and an entire television channel dedicated to porn.

The fact that you can have all of these things at home, if you pay enough money, that no one has left a mint on a hotel room pillow since 1972 and that the Internet has all but destroyed the hotel room porn industry does little to alter the perception, for most of my male friends, that living in a hotel is as good as it gets.

For most of my female friends: not so much.

“A year? That sounds like an unmitigated living hell,” enthused my friend Kate when I explained my plan.

Girls, explained Kate as their spokesperson, like to live in their own places, surrounded by familiar things. They like having their own shelves and cupboards and wardrobes to house those things. They like having their own kitchens to cook their own food. Girls like owning cushions. To live in a hotel, they would have to leave their cushions behind: bringing your own cushions to a hotel is like bringing your own salt to a restaurant.

To make things even more interesting, and probably partly to send Kate further into meltdown, I’d decided that my cushions wouldn’t be the only thing I was leaving behind in London.

My original plan had been to pack as much of my life as possible into a suitcase, and then to put all of my other possessions into storage for a year. I may not have been as attached to my stuff as Kate was to hers, but I still wasn’t entirely certain I wanted to get rid of it forever.

Keeping at least my furniture in storage meant I could pick up my life from where I left off when I got back.

Another hour of Internet research, though, showed me that even
the cheapest storage company in London wanted £100 a month in rental fees—$200 straight off my hotel budget, to rent a tiny little metal apartment for all of my possessions to live in while I was away.
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It was at that point I determined that, if a ridiculous adventure is worth doing, it’s worth doing properly.

Heading back to the Internet—honestly, what did we do without it?
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—I fired up the East Dulwich Forum, a site where people in my part of South London could sell their unwanted possessions. With my laptop balanced on one arm, I walked around my apartment listing everything in sight: my bed, my DVD collection, my sofa, my plates, even the contents of my kitchen drawers. “Spatula—hardly used—quick sale essential—no reasonable offer refused.”

On hearing this, as I’d hoped, Kate lost her mind.

“You can’t sell all of your stuff!” she screeched. “What about all of your books? And you’ve got those lovely brown suede cushions. You can’t sell them!”

“I’m going to give the books to charity,” I replied. “You can have the cushions if you like.”

“Really? OK!”

Girls really like owning cushions.

In the days that followed, half of South London came to my apartment. They came in cars, and vans and even bicycles. My sofa went to a man called Peter who had been kicked out by his wife and was starting again from scratch.

“I’ll be needing a sturdy sofa for all the women I’m going to be bringing back,” he said, in no way creepily.

My DVD collection—about a hundred discs that I never watched—went to a woman from some kind of local youth group who was hoping
they’d “keep the kids out of trouble,” in the way that only
A Clockwork Orange
and
If …
really can.

It doesn’t matter how unattached you are to “stuff,” watching strangers coming and going, each visit leaving your apartment slightly more bare than before, is a freaky experience. Like being burgled in slow motion, in exchange for money.

Less than a week after posting my first ad, all I had left was a sleeping bag, a couple of pillows, my clothes, a small pile of personal bits and pieces that I was planning on taking with me, a flat screen television and my guitar. The guitar and the television were the last—and the most heart-warming—things to go. During my first year at university I’d decided that I was going to learn to play the guitar in order to impress girls. I chose the most expensive guitar I could afford—a Fender Stratocaster—on the flawed justification that, having spent so much money on the damned thing, I’d have to learn to play it.

Of course I never did. Instead, I carried it from house to house for almost a decade, never once so much as connecting it to the amplifier. It was the most expensive hat stand I’ve ever owned; not least because I don’t own a single hat.
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And then, less than a week before I was due to move out, a fifteen-year-old kid called Stuart turned up at my apartment. He’d brought his mom with him because—it soon became clear—he couldn’t understand why some guy would sell a Fender Stratocaster guitar and amp for fifty quid, and so assumed the advert was a trap.

Still, after listening to my ridiculous explanation of why I had to get rid of everything I owned by the end of the month, Stuart seemed satisfied that I wasn’t planning to rape and murder him. He picked up the guitar, handling it like a doctor might pick up a donated kidney—confidently but respectfully.