Travel media and budget hotels
I have come to the conclusion that people working in the travel media are in some kind of fantasy land. Recently, I have seen so many stories about the best budget hotels in various locations and have had the same reaction every time. Simply put, the travel media definition of ‘budget’ is vastly different to that of anyone actually travelling on a budget.
Travel and Leisure and Sunday Times on a ‘budget’
Take this ‘Best New Budget Hotels’ piece from Travel + Leisure. Many of the hotels chosen cost over US$125 (EUR87/ £75) a night. One of them is an absurd US$250 (EUR154/ £150) a night for a double.
Or maybe this piece on budget hotels in Vienna from the Sunday Times. Prices are up around the EUR100 (£90/ US$144) mark. Put ‘best budget hotel’ and the name of pretty much any publication you care to test into Google and you’ll find similarly up-in-clouds articles.
Genuine budget travellers
Just who are these pieces aimed at? They’re an absolute nonsense – no-one genuinely travelling in the ‘budget’ category would even look at these hotels. They’re way too expensive for a genuine economy traveller – and I’d also hazard a guess that they’re far too pricey for the general population at large.
Budget hotels – without resorting to dorms
When I’m travelling alone, I am usually trying to be as economical as possible. I’m not prepared to resort to dorms any more, but my benchmark is usually £50 a night (around EUR56 or US$80) – and that’s an absolute maximum. It’s extremely rare to find a destination where I can’t find good, clean, perfectly acceptable accommodation for less than £50. Geneva and Dubai are possible exceptions here, but the general rule holds firm. Usually, I’ll get somewhere for under £40 a night, and that’s even with the hammering the pound has taken on exchange rates over the last year.
Articles about budget accommodation: hotels that should be included
These are the places we should be reading about in articles about budget accommodation – not stylish ‘boutique’ wankfests with good PR agencies and tariffs that don’t even skim the edge of ‘budget’.
Budget hotel rooms = under £50 a night
I earn good money by just about any measure, but I still think anything over £50 a night falls into the mid-range bracket. Anything over £90 is most definitely in the splash-out category. I’m sure I’m not alone in this – I have friends and acquaintances who earn way over the national average, but still regard shelling out £75 a night or more as something of an extravagance.
Luxurious spa resorts vs cheap accommodation
Just because a publication usually indulges in pathetic travel porn about luxurious spa resorts costing hundreds of pounds a night doesn’t mean that anything below that level is ‘budget’. Such articles are either poorly researched by lazy journalists or totally mis-billed by editors and sub-editors who inhabit a world that a large swathe of their readership can only dip into very occasionally.
Tags: accommodation, budget hotel, budget travel, economy, hotel, PR, Sunday Times, Travel + Leisure, travel media, Travel Writing
Hi David
Having written for some of the publications you mention above, I do see where you coming from, but on the other hand, I think the term ‘budget’ has to be relevant to the city you’re visiting.
While £50 a night might get you a decent budget hotel in Bangkok or Berlin, £50 a night (standard rate – see below) for a double room in London, Vienna or Tokyo will be quite grim indeed.
You can probably get a perfectly lovely double room in Slovenia for £50 a night, but pay the same in Austrian cities, and you’ll likely be in a hostel or else dealing with poor cleaning, service, facilities or location. And very few magazines or newspapers would be willing to recommend their readers visit such an establishment.
Also, bear in mind the rates published in papers and mags are nearly always standard rates because deals change so much, therefore, even if a room is listed in an article as ‘Doubles from £150′, you might often be able to find it for much less with a special deal.
Jill
Infects all of aspirational lifestyle media – I once saw a ‘budget fashion’ spread feature a £90 cardie. Bargain. I’ll take two.
Fair point, Jill – but the point is, the travel media should be thinking about their readers when they use the term ‘budget travel’. What prices are in the destination, in this case, is an irrelevance: the point is – or should be – to write an article that is geared towards how much money has Jo(e) Public got in his/her pocket to spend, not one that reflects the relative price positions of national economies…
The thing I get asked most by a long chalk (by real people spending their own money)is to recommend places to stay in Spain that are fine but not grotty with a handy location. That’s it. I’m always trying to find places like this – say €80 double, €50 single, tops – and put in the legwork, because it’s what I want too. It’s totally baffling that for most pieces you only get to recommend one ‘budget’ place at the end of a list of stupidly expensive hotels. Annoyingly, these recommendations then get pinched endlessly by journos who don’t spend their time tramping around foreign cities. Am thinking of sticking something totally ridiculous in in future to catch them out with the cut and paste…
Hi David – It’s also about the sector the magazine/newspaper is targetting. Like you I’d say £50 is budget… but readers of the ‘travel porn’ mags you describe might well see £150 for a double as budget eg T&L, Conde Nast Traveller… I’d say £150 probably IS ‘budget’ for these titles.
My gripe is the word ’boutique’. Surely this should mean small, quirky and independent?? I did a search for ’boutique hotels in Malaysia’ on a travel website recently and got offered the Sheraton in KL!
@ Annie.. it’s not baffling at all the editors don’t want you to mention more than one budget place… the budget places aren’t going to advertise next to your features… the luxury places are far more likely to. Sad but that’s the way it is these days…
Hi David, In guidebook terms, I usually get asked to price bracket into 3 or 4 categories at most which means you have to cover everything from £30 to £500 a night in very broad sweeps. As a result, I generally set my budget category at anything under about £100 a night for a double b&b, but will try and squeeze in a mention of what good value it is if something is under £50 (relatively few places are). Not my idea of budget, but different for many people…
By the way, Jeremy, I agree entirely that boutique is one of those words that is completely misused – a 300-room monstrosity is not a boutique hotel. Nor is a former pub with chintz and china dogs.
Aargh – just wrote a huge reply to this, and lost it due to shitty hotel wireless.
Ah well, here comes the summarised version.
1) If there are no budget hotels worth writing about in a city, why run a piece on budget hotels in that city? You wouldn’t run a piece on the best drinking establishments in Brunei, would you?
2) How much disposable the readers have, how much they’d like to have and how much the publications would like their advertisers to believe they have are three very different things.
3) There’s a vast audience of ABs/ ABCs out there who are not being catered for. They’re exactly the ones Annie mentioned. They may earn good money, but they aren’t living in a fantasy land where £150 a night constitutes ‘budget’. They may read the likes of Conde Nast for a bit of fantasy, however. Publications are tailoring prices to the small upper percentage of their readership, rather than the mean or median.
maybe it is coz the travel writers are getting/wanting freebies and so they don’t want to stay in actual cheap “budget” hotels then why would they need to write about them? so intead they set the mark at the level of accomodation they would like to be comped.
Absolutely fantastic post. I’ve written about my frustrations with precisely this sort of thing many times, especially with regard to the US budget travel press. It will never stop amazing me that $300/night hotels can be plugged as bargains. Nearly every place I’ve visited in my years of traveling for work or for pleasure—including insanely expensive places like St. Barts and Anguilla—has a few guesthouses with rates under $100. That these inns get virtually no coverage astounds and annoys me beyond measure.
[...] post on the travel media and budget hotels by David Whitely, aka the Grumpy Traveller (a freelance travel journalist currently residing in [...]
Great piece David, what constitutes a budget hotel seems to depend your travel budget. In Italy last year I managed to find decent double rooms for around £60 a night including breakfast in Umbria and Tuscany in May.
For the UK the best budget option is Travelodge promotional rates, they’re running £12 sale at moment, which for ensuire room is cheaper than a bed in a hostel dorm.
I’m glad someone’s finally addressed this. For a while there, I thought I was either becoming increasingly dirt-poor (I don’t think I am), or inflation is gaining at a pace I can’t even begin to comprehend.
What bothers me the most are the hotel rates. Decent, sometimes even really good-quality airline fares can be had, and struggling restaurants are always trying to get more customers in the door with dinner specials, etc., but hotels and travel lodgings in general don’t seem to ever really let up. A week’s stay at a so-called ‘budget’ hotel or inn in a major city is almost equivalent to one month’s rent there. I didn’t say I was planning to live in London, or NYC, or Paris, etc! I just want to stay long enough to see as much as I can, as tourist, as visitor.
Last fall, I stayed in NYC for a week at about $200 a night. My room was tiny, about 200 square feet total, including the bathroom. It wasn’t 4-star, it wasn’t even near any particular sites, and it definitely wasn’t a deluxe suit. It was in Manhattan but not near any popular location (I stayed on E.23rd at Third). At the time, I thought “Wow, that’s a bargain,” but I always felt that was still pretty pricey. When I read your article, I was so relieved to know that it wasn’t just me who thought some of these ‘affordable,’ ‘budget’ prices weren’t really that great.
If there’s anything keeping me from traveling these days, it’s not the airfare and it’s not even for lack of money – it’s the accommodation. I inevitably always encounter a situation where even the recommended ‘budget’ options blow my total budget out of the water.