The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations Read Online Free

The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations
Book: The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations Read Online Free
Author: Paul Carr
Tags: General, Travel, Special Interest
Pages:
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experience. Through seeing my parents at work, I know how hotels operate. A hotel bedroom is a highly perishable commodity—if it hasn’t been sold by the end of the day, it’s gone forever. I know the times of the year when rooms are hardest to sell and, as a result, when bargain rates are there for the taking. In most cities, the first couple of months of the year are slow so I knew I’d find some good deals on rooms in New York as long as I didn’t stay much beyond the middle of March.
    After that I could head to second-tier cities, or even small towns, where cheaper rooms are available all year round. I also know that the longer you stay in a hotel, the better the deals get. Hotels love long-staying guests: not only are those guests filling a room for a month or longer, but they’re also very likely to use other hotel services like laundry and room service and the bar.
    For all these reasons, there isn’t a hotel on the planet that won’t give you a decent discount for a long stay. You don’t even have to haggle:
just ask. One little known, but extraordinarily useful, fact is that in most cities you don’t pay local tax (10–15 percent in most US cities) on stays over thirty nights. In the UK, stays over twenty-eight nights are tax-free. Armed with just this basic information—and a willingness to learn more as I traveled—I was confident that living in hotels was a perfectly feasible way to spend a year.
    By the end of April I’d have to leave America so I didn’t overstay the visa waiver, but then I could travel around Europe for a bit before heading back to the US once a decent amount of time had elapsed. Friends had told me that, as long as you leave a couple of months between visits, you can pretty much travel back and forth on the visa waiver indefinitely.
    Then, by December, I’d head back to London for Christmas and start house hunting in time for January. That would still give me an entire year to figure out what I was going to do with my life before I turned thirty. And if living in hotels didn’t work out? Well, then I’d just come home early.

104
    There’s one more thing you need to know about living in hotels for a year. It’s fucking brilliant. It is also “living the fucking dream.”
    These are all things you learn when you start telling your male friends that you’re thinking about doing it.
    “That’s a fucking brilliant idea,” said Robert when I told him my plan. “Anyone can live in a hotel for a month. That’s just a long holiday. But living in them for a whole year. That’s living the fucking dream.”
    I could see his point. It’s hard to see a downside in spending twelve months in a place where a woman dressed as a maid comes to your
room every morning, delivers fresh towels, recovers the remote control from behind the bed, replenishes the fridge with beer and tiny tubes of Pringles and leaves a mint on your pillow.
    A place with a bar and restaurant downstairs, and a uniformed man whose whole purpose is to get you things that you ask for, and to call you “sir.” Oh, and an entire television channel dedicated to porn.
    The fact that you can have all of these things at home, if you pay enough money, that no one has left a mint on a hotel room pillow since 1972 and that the Internet has all but destroyed the hotel room porn industry does little to alter the perception, for most of my male friends, that living in a hotel is as good as it gets.
    For most of my female friends: not so much.
    “A year? That sounds like an unmitigated living hell,” enthused my friend Kate when I explained my plan.
    Girls, explained Kate as their spokesperson, like to live in their own places, surrounded by familiar things. They like having their own shelves and cupboards and wardrobes to house those things. They like having their own kitchens to cook their own food. Girls like owning cushions. To live in a hotel, they would have to leave their cushions behind: bringing your own cushions
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