I’ve moved from my last residence this past June 25th and have set myself up in a hotel until my next place will become available to move into next week. At first I approached this plan with trepidation thinking it would be a major inconvenience; now I find myself kind of liking it. Coffee and breakfast are waiting for me in the morning, someone else does the housekeeping, I’m steps away from fitness equipment/pool/hot tub, no bills to pay other than the room charge - internet included. The biggest bonus is that I live in a high rent area and the hotel charges are actually slightly less than my rent payments. What’s not to like? Maybe if I had to do this for months on end the novelty would wear off. I’m curious as to the length of time others have “lived” in a hotel and their thoughts on the experience.
Can I ask how much you’re paying for the hotel? Even in the expensive Bay Area that I used to live in I’m struggling to understand the math. A $100 (incl. all taxes and fees) hotel room would be about $3000 a month. Even in SF I would have thought you could rent an apartment for one person for less than that.
Otherwise I agree with your sentiment. Back in my business travel days the longest I did in a hotel was two weeks (pretty often actually). I liked it. It was easy living, and I got to efficiently use my work down time exploring the touristy sites.
When I travel, I sometimes stay in a hotel for a week or two at a time. I try to keep it around $15-20 a night, and it has all the conveniences and amenities the OP described. That’s less than the rent on my apartment at home.
However, I actually prefer hostels, there are more like-minded travelers coming and going, so easier for socialization. And usually a little cheaper.
Never have personally, but have stayed a few days in some hotels where some of the guests have been long term billeted due to construction or damage/destruction covered well by insurance.
It can get addictive… especially when some hotels have a guest free happy hour in the lobbies on Friday.
(It may not be French, but its free & you get to meet the other guests.)
Fifteen years ago I took a couple of week-long bar prep classes in a city a few hours from where I lived. I stayed in an extended stay motel for $199 per week. It was like a studio apartment, full kitchen, supplied with dishes, cooking pans and utensils. It had a dining table with chairs, a bed and a TV. Once a week they’d do housekeeping while I was out. It was perfect for what I needed. I wouldn’t use it long-term unless I absolutely needed to, but for a month or two I wouldn’t mind.
Driver8 -
I’ve been pretty savvy utilizing Priceline’s “name your own price” feature and have gotten both 2 1/2 and 3 star rooms averaging about $65/night. The rooms have microwave/fridges so I’m not spending much extra on groceries. I pilfer a cup of yogurt and a bagel with a little thingy of peanut butter and an apple everyday from the continental breakfast bar for lunch (I don’t feel bad about this because my room charge is technically for two people to stay in the room and on work days I’m the only one staying in the room). For me (in Chicagoland) it is thus far less costly than rent. Go figure.
My employer put me up in a hotel for a month, and my experience was pretty much the same as yours, prompting me to wonder, wherever hotel charges are equal or less than renting an apartment, why isn’t everyone doing this?
I am wondering the exact same thing! I especially wonder why elderly folks aren’t choosing this as opposed to massively priced assisted living (maybe they are?)- the daily cost of a hotel room must be less expensive - they’d have the cleaning service and a couple of meals a day. Hire a caregiver for bathing/errands/etc… 2-3x’s a week, still I think it would cost less! And many hotels have “van service” which I imagine could take people to their doctor’s appts, etc…
It is fairly unusual but some people do just that. Even nicer hotels can be cheaper than assisted living even if you just pay the normal rates but that isn’t the only option. You can buy some hotel rooms (not a time-share, you really own the room with a deed and mortgage and everything) and make some of your money back by letting the hotel rent it out when you aren’t there and split the money with them. That can be a good option in really expensive tourist areas like the famous ski towns in Colorado.
Have you ever noticed how cheap some cruise prices are if you don’t tack on any extras? Some people noticed that too and live on cruise ships for months or years at a time. For just a few thousand a month, you can cruise full-time with all meals and lots of service provided. There was one elderly lady that was the only full-time resident of the QE2 as it went back and forth between the UK and US.
Interesting article links - food for thought with regard to planning a retirement! Thinking outside of the box with the options presented as I’d never considered them - especially the cruise ship.
I seem to remember from my experience a notice in the room that said even if you were staying the next week, you had to grab all your stuff out of the room for a few hours, check out and then check back in, or some such procedure. It wasn’t a big deal for me. I had a couple changes of clothes and some groceries, but I could see it being a pain if you were long term and had more things.
I had to stay at a Residence Inn for 3 months in 2005 when our house was partially destroyed due to a 150 year old giant oak tree strike in a microburst (very similar to a localized tornado) that came very close to killing my young daughter. I had to pick her up from her bed in the middle of the night with water pouring in from the ceiling and lots of branches piercing her bed. Luckily, they all missed and none of them impaled her.
It was me, my then wife, young daughter and large Samoyed dog stuck in a hotel suite but it wasn’t bad at all. We had two bedrooms and a small kitchen so it wasn’t a typical hotel room but everything else about it was. The hotel itself was just fine except we had to deal with having an antique house rebuilt while we were there. The hotel provided dinner and maid service every day. I didn’t care much about that at the time but I am glad it was there especially because our insurance company paid for all of it. I would have liked it a lot more if I could have taken advantage of the amenities but we were just trying to get by and back home while we were there.
I am currently trying to redesign my current home to operate as close to a hotel as possible down to the carpets and minimalist design. I figure they know better than anyone what is really needed so I will just follow their general ideas.
That hasn’t been my experience. I’ve had two stays this year over three weeks each, and I never had to move out.
I think it depends on the state’s landlord-tenant laws. In some, it’s easier for a long-term guest to become a tenant.
There was a woman in D.C. who lived in an extended stay hotel for 10 years, and got a deal on it by negotiating special deals. She moved out to live with her daughter, then moved back in after a while. I think she’s passed away now.
I had to live in a hotel while I waited for my house to close. It took three months.
At first, it was fun. Somebody else looks after housekeeping. Then it got to be a drag–I missed my cats (they were in somebody else’s good care, just not mine). And it got expensive to stay. Food was a problem–Room Service was far too expensive on a daily basis, so I ended up mostly getting Burger King from across the street, and Papa John’s pizza from the place in the local plaza. And there were the questions about what my legal address actually was–sure, I technically live elsewhere, but I’m moving to this city soon. Really, believe me, seriously!
Yeah, few did.
On closing day, I and my cats, moved in. I may have to look after our own housekeeping, but we are all, cats and me, happy with our situation. And still are.
My first job after college–the “Oh, you may have to travel about 30% of the time” one, which turned out to be more like 75%–left me living in a hotel for 4+ months at a stretch several times. They weren’t necessarily terrible hotels, though they were uniformly cheap, no-frills places, because engineers didn’t rate posh accommodations. (Besides, there usually weren’t any fancy places in the locations I got sent to.)
Here’s my impression from those experiences:
A stay that long is not like a one- or two-week stay. You start to miss having some of your own stuff around you–like a book you wanted to re-read after discussing it with someone. The list of things you miss accumulates. You can’t work on hobbies or personal projects unless they’re very portable and don’t make much mess. If you normally cook for yourself, you’ll start to miss it; eating every meal from the limited set of nearby restaurants gets old. You can’t change or rearrange much about the room, like you could in your own home, and the impersonality of the place starts to grate. You find reasons to dislike the bland, inoffensive print on the wall above the bed. The room seems increasingly cramped the longer you’re there, because the space isn’t allocated the way it would be in a home. You look for excuses to be anywhere else during your downtime–drinking, shopping, whatever–which can get expensive. (I hung out in book and game stores until closing, if there were any around. There often weren’t.) Sometimes, late at night, you look around the room, and the impermanence hits you; if you check out in the morning, by noon, it will be like you were never there. Months of your life wiped away with a dust rag. It makes you feel sort of like a ghost, haunting someone else’s house.
Your mileage may vary. Convenience might matter more to you than all that stuff. It drove me up the wall, though–and I wasn’t alone. There were sixteen of us hired for that job on the same day, and we all got the same kind of assignments. I lasted just under two years in it, and I was the last one to quit. Living in hotels all the time wasn’t the only reason for the turnover, but it was part of it.
i’ve had to do it a few times and in general I hate it, but then, I’ve known very few hotels where I didn’t hate the décor. Hard to like a place when the room itself is uncomfortable, both physically (allergies) and psychologically (seriously, would it be possible to get some space here?).
- carpet.
- overstuffed armchairs.
- there is barely any open space left.
- ok, so it’s a “business hotel” and there isn’t a single surface where it’s comfortable to use my laptop. Makes perfect sense in somebody else’s world.
- oh, and your receptionists can’t reset the damned router, which is down again.
Plus, a lot of the “amenities” which other people value, such as access to sports, are of zero to negative value to me. I move out to yet another rented apartment as soon as I can.
My favorite hotel in the world has parquet floors, enough floor space to do stretching exercises or yoga without running into anything, and is in Bilbao’s Old Town, with easy access to some of the damn best food in the world. I’ve had locals tell me they couldn’t remember a hotel in that location: “you know the deli?” “yeees” “hotel is across the street, you haven’t seen it because you can’t see from the rear”. And the receptionist can reset the router.
That work out to over $2000 a month. You can’t find a one bedroom apartment in Chicago for a thousand? I can.
There are stories like this one, in which someone rented a condo in California for 44 day, prepaying for thirty days in advance. After thirty days, they refused to pay any more money. But at that point they were treated legally as month-to-month tenants, who the landlord would need to evict (a long, complex process).
So I can understand why a hotelier would want you to vacate your room after a period and rent another under a new contract.