Regular readers of my weekly blog will know I love lists — places traveled to, airlines used, airports I’ve embarked from or disembarked off. The list of lists goes on.
I have my own website so that I can remember all the components of the lists. The website is essentially for storage, not sharing, but it is easy enough to find.
One of those lists is “hotels stayed at,” and I see with delight that when I attend the International Hotel Investment Forum in Berlin on March 31 to April 2 (get your tickets now), the hotel I stay at will be my 500th.
It happens it will be an Accor-branded hotel.
This is peanuts for most of you. I am sure some in our industry stay at 250 or so every year, or more, but for me it is a total I recognize, if not feel proud of or elated by.
The thing is, though, I realize I do not remember anything about a lot of them.
Looking down through the list, I have to say, no, not a great deal.
The first hotel on the list is Ahaspokuna in Belihuloya, Sri Lanka.
Yes, I remember that one vividly as it is a jungle camp — a very, very nice one — and it had a small central tent where dinner and drinks were served. The grounds had plenty of bird species (yet another list and accompanying, massive PDF document of related notes), and elephant dung one morning appeared 40 feet from my stilted-tent structure. One needed to walk for 20 minutes from a small road through jungle to reach it. Yes, very memorable.
The last hotel on the list is Zubeyda Waber Harari Cultural Guest House in Harar, Ethiopia.
The room was cramped and there were hundreds of pieces of local art, baskets, hats and other things on the walls as you went from the accommodations area to the main public areas, which now are a complete blank in my mind.
Truth to say (sorry brands), but it is the independent hotels I remember.
The Sheraton Jerusalem? Zero memories, other than it was a distance from it to the Old Town.
The Oro Verde in Lima, Peru? Nope, nothing again, although I think it might be the first place I tried both ceviche and a pisco sour. (Oro Verde is a hotel firm now only operating in Ecuador, a country I have never been to — my lists are far from complete.)
Eleanor’s Northern Lights Bed & Breakfast in Fairbanks, Alaska, USA. (This is how I list U.S. entries, by the way. Consistency is critically important.) A blank, although the owners were very nice.
Maybe that is the entire point of hoteliers and hotels.
I am not alone, albeit I might share a world with made-up characters.
Do you remember the wonderful 1989 Jim Jarmusch movie, “Mystery Train,” set in the fictional Arcade Hotel, Memphis, Tennessee, USA?
There is dialogue between two Japanese guests.
Mitsuko: “Jun, why do you only take pictures of the rooms we stay in and never what we see outside while we travel?”
Jun: “Those other things are in my memory. The hotel rooms and the airports are the things I’ll forget.”
Things get forgotten. They also change.
What is fun in the list is that the name of any one hotel then might not be the name it has now. It might not even be a hotel now, as is the case with Eleanor’s. Likely, the ownership group has changed, the brand over the door, numerous things.
Most fun, though, is the collective experience I have been so very fortunate to have from staying at all 500. That is priceless, and I do remember sufficient collectively to know it has been an adventure very well worth having.
One thing I regret is having the hotel list in alphabetical order, not chronological. I could have a stab at putting them in date order, but I will not, I know, as I could never look at that altered list and believe it had any fresh authenticity.
Is there one hotel I have absolutely no memory of even having been to?
Let’s look.
It only took me nine hotels into my list — the Apollo Hotel Utrecht City Centre in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
I remember Utrecht. It’s very nice, but even with the Sheraton Jerusalem I remember the curved approach leading up to the entrance after the 15-minute jog to the Old Town. Sorry, Apollo, my brain — not the largest by any means — has no recollection.
That just means I need to go back, I guess!
The Glenavon House Hotel in Cookstown, Northern Ireland. Less than zero, although I remember driving down the town’s High Street, which I was told is the longest in the United Kingdom.
I like hotels, please do not get me wrong, and the same hotel will mean something different to everyone who stays there, which is as it should be.
The Monasterio de Cusco, now a Belmond property, in Cusco, Peru, was magnificent, and I remember thinking that being there was so wonderful and fulfilling, maybe I would get nothing more for my memory bank by wandering out into Cusco itself.
I did, of course, and it does.
The Desmond Hotel & Conference Center in Albany, New York, USA. I remember that because I felt it was surreal. I had never seen a hotel where the rooms opened to and surround a fake “village,” an indoor patio-type setting with a restaurant, bar and shops facing the guestroom doors.
The outsides of the guestrooms were covered in scalloped tiles, I remember, to replicate houses. Perhaps such design and approach is not considered so odd, but at the time I remember feeling it was very much surreal. Today it is part of IHG Hotels & Resorts under its Crowne Plaza flag.
I keep the old names alive, not the new ones.
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