I love hotels. Growing up, my family never stayed in them (we were poor but we were honest, M’Lud). Instead we went to Butlin’s, sharing a tiny ‘chalet’, or we stayed at bed and breakfasts; private lodgings where you got exactly those two things but had to be out and about during the daylight hours – come hell, high water or hailstones. For those too young to have experienced them, a B&B is basically the exact opposite of an Airbnb, where you’re allowed to stay in every single moment of every day you’ve hired it for, if that’s what turns you on. I’ve only stayed in one Airbnb, which was a houseboat in Amsterdam; I love boats and I love Amsterdam (or I did, before it went mad), but I never wanted to repeat the experience, because – hotels.
If you can afford to travel to someone else’s country, you can afford to do the decent thing and stay in one of their hotels
I first stayed in one, in Liverpool, when I became a teenage music hack, and it was as much as I could do to drag myself out to see the Ramones, so entranced was I gazing for the first time upon toilet paper folded to a perfect point. When I got to Fleet Street in my twenties, there was a lot of money around and no one thought anything of doing three figures worth of damage to the mini-bar on expenses, so I always thought of hotels as being things that my employers paid for – until I started making mad money in my thirties. A lot of people think I blew my fortune on cocaine, but I reckon hotels were to blame: Elounda Bay Palace in Crete (‘Oh, you’re at the posh one – we’re at Elounda Beach, next door,’ said Lord Bragg when I bumped into him at the baggage carousel), Reid’s Palace in Madeira, the George V in Paris, the W in Barcelona, the Dan in Tel Aviv… the money I spent on them would have bought me a house, easily – and I’m talking a house in central London, with a garden and a helipad.
But it’s when I think of the Ritz-Carlton Abama Golf and Spa Resort in Tenerife that I catch my breath. For a decade I saw it as a kind of lover – a lover with seven swimming pools and a funicular. Once, entering the lobby for the eighth time in two years, I wondered if there was actually something wrong with me, and if it was possible to stalk a hotel – sounds mad, but there are people who fall in love with the Statue of Liberty and who marry bridges, so why not? The Ritz-Carlton is an epic pink citadel framed by snow-topped Mount Teide on one side and the smallest, most perfectly formed beach on the other. At night it became a shimmering pleasure dome housing ten restaurants, four bars and a nightclub, all lit with thousands of flaming torches. But my word, you’ve never seen a tab like it. So it’s with a kind of satisfied malice that I read regularly about Airbnb guests having a rotten time due to the increasing animosity towards them from residents; why should they get away with ‘living like a local’ when I went bust tipping twenties 12 times a day?
The latest spat took place in Milan last week, where fuming locals attached stickers reading ‘Less short lets, more houses for all’ to key safes; their slogan is, perfectly, ‘This city is not a hotel’. Their complaint is the same as in all other photogenic hotspots: Airbnb invariably decimates the housing supply and prices locals out of city centres – thus making a city a simulacrum, a shadow puppet, of itself. In Florence, where almost a third of all flats are Airbnb flop-houses, the slogan is ‘Let’s save Florence so we can live in it’. In Rome, activists calling themselves ‘Robin Hood’ have destroyed key safes, attaching posters to lampposts around the city under Robin Hood felt hats, describing their actions as an attack on ‘the rich’. ‘If you are looking for the key safes and can’t find them, read this. We are rebelling. We have removed these key storage boxes to denounce the sell-out of the city to short-stay holidays which alienate locals and leave residents out on the streets.’
Usually I’d blame the pesky Europeans – being a Brexit voter – but for once I’m on their side against those of my countrymen who have gone down the Airbnb route. Though the stingy are drawn to them (no staff to tip – perfect for those sad seat-sniffers who take their pocket calculators to Christmas parties at Pizza Express) they don’t actually cost that much less than standard hotels. What they do is make inadequate snobs feel less like ‘tourists’ and more like ‘travellers’ – and like most things ‘travellers’ do, they actually make things far worse for locals than tourists ever could, even awful working-class tourists of the type that the hack India Knight singled out as ‘the people you always see in airports having pints for breakfast’. Some deluded souls even seem to think that if you call yourself a traveller rather than a tourist, locals will like you more. But the Milanese activist Giacomo Negri summed it up perfectly when he told the Times: ‘We really wish tourists well – but we want them to stay in hotels.’
So there you have it, you Airbnb-loving cheapskates – don’t kid yourself that you’re living like a local when you’re actually ruining the locals’ lives by driving them out of their neighbourhoods. Why are you so scared of hotels? What’s missing in your desiccated little soul that can’t you appreciate the sublime feeling of walking back into a room that was left looking as though Aerosmith had stayed there alongside the Welsh national rugby team – and now it’s immaculate? Or the thrill of leaving a lovely big tip for the maid and finding a note the next day telling you that you are her best guest ever? And of course, those two perfect words: hotel sex.
Perhaps the limpest excuse for choosing Airbnb is that hotels are ‘soulless’ – but I beg to differ. With so much of the distracting drear of daily life removed, hotels leave our souls free to breathe, to look themselves in the eye and decide if they like what they see. And maybe this is why certain types of saddos are unsettled by hotels and the freedom they offer; they make us face ourselves by removing domestic drudgery, often an effective diversions from admitting how dismayed we are by our lives. Without meals to organise and floors to vacuum, how many apparently cosy houses of cards might come tumbling down. I’m saying that if you can afford to travel to someone else’s country, you can afford to do the decent thing and stay in one of their hotels rather than gobble up their housing stock – and if you really are too stingy, maybe try a good old B&B, and stay out all day, having fun like a good tourist rather than mooching about like a boring traveller.
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