Comfort vs. Convenience in Hotels

Going abroad is an incredibly popular thing to do for many people. With the advent of modern transportation such as airplanes, traveling overseas has become a relatively easy thing to do. Traveling can provide us with the opportunities to learn more about the world we live in, and more about ourselves. For many, to travel the world is one of the dreams that they aspire to.

However, traveling also requires money and organization. Part of that organization includes booking a hotel, and there are so many to choose from. Because of the amount of choice we have when booking a hotel, we need to prioritize something. What’s most important when looking for a place to stay? Is it comfort, or perhaps convenience?

What do you imagine when somebody says ‘a comfortable hotel’? For me, I imagine a hotel that provides clean rooms, plenty of towels, and a soft bed, among other things. All of these things are great, but honestly, I think that they also have a downside. The better your hotel room is, the less inclined you’ll be to leave it. This can be a problem, because most of the time you’re paying a significant amount of money to go to a different country and perhaps experience new things. If you’re holing up inside your hotel, you’re not really experiencing the country. A comfy hotel room in Hawaii is pretty much the same as a comfy hotel room in France, or in Japan. You get the complimentary shampoo, you get the room service, and you get the bath that’s bigger and better than the one you have at home.

Having said all this, staying at a hotel that isn’t comfortable is not a very pleasant experience. Some hotels are dirty, too small, and don’t even provide hot water. You’ll be fulfilling the purpose of your trip by getting outside of your hotel and seeing what’s around, but at the end of the day you’ll be returning to that itchy bed with the springs that you can feel on your back, giving you a rough night’s sleep.

When it comes to convenience, being in a good location and having good hotel facilities is very useful when you’re abroad. Starting with location, it’s really nice to be close to the places you want to see and things you want to do when you travel somewhere. You might come from a city like Tokyo, with trains and buses that come every 10 minutes and go pretty much anywhere you need to go in the city. This is definitely not the case for many places around the world. If you’re going to travel somewhere, you don’t want to be spending too much time trying to navigate, figuring out how to get to where you want to go. And so, location most certainly plays a role in making your trip better. Using the example of Tokyo again, if you’re staying in a hotel in Shinjuku, you have easy access to so many popular spots, and a ton of shops and restaurants.

Having a hotel that provides the facilities you need is another way to provide convenience on your trip. Perhaps you have a habit of going to the gym three times a week, and you want to keep that up even while you’re traveling. Well, if you stay at a hotel with a gym, you can absolutely do that. Perhaps on one day you really just want to spend the evening at the hotel. If the hotel has a restaurant or room service, you can just use either of those!

People travel for a multitude of different reasons, and depending on what those reasons are, as well as the preferences of the individual, the priorities of comfort and convenience change. We should choose our hotels after some consideration, though, because an uncomfortable, inconvenient hotel really isn’t good!

Thomas

Vocabulary

aspire (v) – to aim one’s hopes at achieving something
prioritize (v) – to treat something as very or most important
inclined (v) – be willing to do something
hole up (phr.v) – to hide oneself away from other people
multitude (n) – a large number of something