2.2 miles (driving distance) if you count a bed & breakfast. 2.7 miles if you want a hotel (it’s an Econo Lodge).
There’s a Novotel a 2.6 km drive away (or one subway stop).
It’s what people do in our culture (we’re South Asian and East Asian).
Your parents get first dibs on your guest rooms.
That’s true in my culture (Ashkenazi Jew), too. Or as @LSLGuy said:
I live in what is technically a small town but really part of the massive sprawl of suburbia outside Toronto. There are no hotels in town that I know of, but there are a few around within about 10 miles. But for real luxury 5-star hotels you’d have to go right into the Big Smoke.
I checked with Google Maps and it looks like there are a couple of small hotels about 1.3 km to 1.6 km away.
Pretty much everything here is within a 15-minute drive of everywhere else (20 minutes in bad traffic), but the closest hotel I can think of is a ten-minute drive away.
Interestingly, a friend who delivered pizzas, including to hotels, always said things like “Tell friends visiting never to stay at ABC Hotel, because that place is nothing more than a drug front. And XYZ Hotel is the place to stay if you like bedbugs.”
Thankfully, I’ve been able to pass this information along to friends visiting town, and they have always found my recommendations clean and comfortable.
I think that’s true of most cultures. I’m British and would offer my parents a room before my siblings. They can sleep in their cars frankly!
Ages ago, before we converted the smallest bedroom to an office, when my husband’s family visited, his parents got the room with the queen bed and his brothers were in the small room with the twin - one of them slept on an air mattress. These days, along with the guest bedroom, we have a futon in the basement. Not that it matters - apart from the grandkids doing an occasional sleepover, the guest room just accumulates miscellany.
This thread got me thinking - I’ve had 3 Dopers (2 no longer post here) visit my house, one of whom actually slept here because she was pet-sitting for us. But even the most recent one was over 10 years ago. When we lived in Florida in 2004, one other Doper dropped in while he was in town on business, but he didn’t need a room since his work was paying for a decent hotel.
There are two across street from us.
I think there’s that tendency in most cultures. If for no other reason than older folks may benefit more from your presence to assist. Had my grandparents ever come to visit while I was 20-something that certainly would have been true.
But IMO some more traditional cultures take it well past tendency to where not doing so would be somewhere between infamous anathema and simply unthinkable.
I agree that it’s probably true of most cultures. If my circumstances were different, parents would get the guestroom before siblings. But I don’t space for more than one adult guest - and all the potential ones live within a half-hour from me.
I also think it depends on the place, the accommodations, and why you are visiting.
When i lived in NYC, lots of friends stayed with us, even though we only had a sofa bed in the living room. We offered free housing in Manhattan near a major subway line. They were visiting NYC. But by staying with us, they saved money and we got to visit with them at breakfast. They usually also took us out to dinner, and maybe we’d spend an afternoon with them.
I now live in the burbs, and don’t get as many house guests, despite a dedicated guest bedroom with a private bath. But except for when my MIL visited, most visitors are still here for something in addition to visiting us. And again, it’s nice to spend time with those people at breakfast before we all go off and do our things.
When friends are in town, they often don’t stay with me, but then if they visit me at all, it’s for an evening or an afternoon. And they are probably visiting a bunch of people while they are in the area.
Likewise, most of the time i crash with a friend, i have some other reason to be in that town. And if the other reason comes with a hotel, i probably won’t spend more than an afternoon or evening with the friends.
I guess you are saying you are coming just to visit me, for more than a day? I can see three days of all-day togetherness being a bit much, and maybe you’d want to retreat to a hotel room, and I’d want some privacy, at the end of the day. But that’s just not how my and my friends travel plans tend to work.
There are at least a half dozen hotels within 2 miles from my house…..I live fairly close to a large shopping mall and the “mall boulevard” with dozens of smaller shopping centers, restaurants and hotels…….sounds convenient but I never utilize any of these places.
I had a couple of Dopefests at my house back in the day - ‘in the day’ being before adopting the Firebug in 2009, so a good while back. And DaveW0071 stayed overnight with us once, can’t remember if that was in conjunction with a Dopefest. I may have stayed over at his place for one of his Dopefests, I can’t remember for sure.
I’m now staying at a hotel that’s only half a mile from a convention, but i can’t get there from here, because it’s down a highway and on the other side, with no sidewalks, a narrow shoulder, and cars merging.
Ick.
My sister lives in Brooklyn, and it’s surprising how far it is from her apartment to the nearest hotels. I joke that she lives near where Avenue Q would be if it were a real street (but it’s true, she’s a block or two from what would be Ave Q if it existed). But it seems like all the hotels are up in Downtown Brooklyn or the Park Slope area. But at least those hotels are near the subway line that takes you to her neighborhood.
That’s how it used to be in my neighborhood in Queens…..and visitors often complained about it - sometimes they would look themselves and find this little crack motel that was less than a mile away -but in a way different neighborhood- and say something like “I don’t need luxury” and I’d have to tell them about all the crackheads and dead hookers.
Then, there was a zoning change and hotels started springing up like weeds…now there are something like 40 properties within a mile of my old address.