9 Comments

The Moxy is grateful for having escaped your wrath.

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I am so glad someone finally articulated what I hate about these places. Also, the way that every website for them shows you the most expensive suite, with a huge bathtub and decor that looks glorious, but you will get a white walled studio with chipped IKEA-esque furniture and a bathroom smaller than most New York closets. It’s an extension of the residential trend Amanda Mull talks about in the “HGTV-ification of America” article in The Atlantic last week. Won’t someone please just put some color and old, dark wood in a place? Surely, there’s tons of decent furniture out there to be saved from landfills.

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This is the same trend as the "hip" workplace environment – if we give you some bean bags, the option to work from home, and a beer cart at 2 p.m. on Fridays, we can severely underpay you and offer you subpar benefits, if any.

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I've been banging on about this for years. You either go low (here in the UK it would be a Travel Lodge. Decent beds, clean, decent locations) or you go high - like a proper hotel that actually knows how to make travel enjoyable. A shit hotel filled with hipster tropes like skyscape wall paper, 'funky' furniture and faux-friendly copywriting is like some kind of purgatory hell. It's, again to use a good UK phrase, 'all mouth and no trousers'.

In their defense; they may be the perfect expression of contemporary mainstream culture.

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Aug 26, 2022·edited Aug 26, 2022

A trend I've noticed recently is old motels, (think Motel 6), being converted into a millennial hotel. Recently had the displeasure of staying at the Basecamp in Boulder. Just hilariously awful and fits perfectly into everything you just described above.

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The only thing worse is Airbnb!

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Yes! Style is no substitute for service and basic, good accommodations and amenities. Esp when the style isn't even great.

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What's worse: The storied, glorious, patina of the Algonquin got a whitewashed Millennial Hotel makeover. It's tragic.

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Oh god. It's so fucking bad.

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