Travel ROX!

Holiday Inn Express, that is, and I’ve been meaning to write this post for years, ever since HIX was invented.

You’ve been driving for hours, and you’re trying to eke out that last 100 miles before having to spend $89 to give your corpus over to Super8 Hell, when you come upon a freeway interchange on the outskirts of nowhere.  You see the signs:  Comfort Inn, Days Inn, La Quinta, etc ad infinitum ad nauseum, but what your eyes are looking for, subconsciously, is that little green logo.  The logo that means everything’s gonna be alright.

It’s the curved shower rod!  Yes, of course – why didn’t we think of that?!  And the free, hot brekkie…and the coffee maker in the room…and the free internet, usually wi-fi…and the new-ish facility…and the consistency.  Isn’t that what McDonald’s proved to the entire universe to be of importance?

Look at it another way.   Always (in big cities at least) there is a choice between modern, sterile but functional and old, quaint, character-filled but dysfunctional overnight accommodations.  Every time we go we ask ourselves which we prefer.  Usually, we pick the New for our first nights after a long flight.  After adjusting, then we can decamp for more real but less functional accommodations, the Mark Hopkins (Nob Hill, San Francisco) the perfect (counter) example:  supposedly luxury, it’s an old property and lots of obsolescence that its well-meaning luxury brand management can do nothing about – at least for terrestrial sums – so exacerbates with à la carte pricing (nickel-and-diming) currently in vogue whereby in a Starwood luxury room you have to shell out another 20 bucks for internet. But the point is that really, we’d rather just have a(n) HIX.   You know the IC group of hotels has absolutely hit the mark with this price point when we could stay anywhere but would really rather just HIX it!