Hotel Roundup: Around Germany in Two Weeks

Hotel hopping, in theory, is never a fun thing. You want to sleep well when you arrive and relish your breakfast in the morning. When you're traveling, it's nice to be able to catch up on social media sites {which is frowned upon by people older than you, always}, grab a drink or two from the bar down below or in the next corner. But getting on into a tour and maximizing every hour in a new country, a new continent means spending least time sleeping and more time exploring.

I don't claim to have mastered the art of choosing a hotel --- but hotels, sometimes, more than just being your temporary home, is an art form. My favorite writer, Alain de Botton writes:

It’s impossible to get to sleep. The prehistoric part of your mind, trained to listen for and interpret every shriek in the trees, is still doing its work, latching on to the slamming of doors and the flushing of toilets in unknown precincts of the building. The sky is a chemical orange colour. 

Being unable to sleep night after night, for weeks on end, is – of course – hell. But in smaller doses, insomnia in a lonely foreign hotel does not need a cure. It’s an asset with some key troubles of the soul. Crucial things you need to think about get a chance to unfold here. During the day, back home, you are dutiful to others, you’re part of a team of thirty. The emails come in by the dozen every ten minutes. Here, for once, in this box at the end of a long corridor, you can return to a bigger duty: to yourself.

Back in the day when I traveled a lot for work, I never so much cared as to which hotel I'm staying in. Usually, I stay in a posh hotel anyway so I am fine since it's not on my dime. True enough, a survey from Agoda affirms my practice:

However, when it came to business travelers, 74% looked at 10 or fewer hotels before booking, a full 10% more than the average. Unsurprisingly, business travelers also placed the least importance on hotel reviews, with 43% saying that they did not play a significant part in determining their hotel choice, versus 38% for all other traveler types. 

When on a personal trip though,  I am the queen of reading reviews! I'd read reviews for days on end until I absolutely need to. Because I'm still not over my recent Germany trip, here's a roundup of my notes about the hotels I stayed in all over Deutschland. Hope it helps you in case you're going there!

• Park Plaza Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, Germany. Berlin is my favorite German city and Park Plaza was such a delight to stay at. I will always remember this hotel because I woke up here to the news of Robin Williams' passing, and the huge bay windows were beginning to shine the sun on me. They had the usual Where magazines and a city guide which I took home, hehe, because Berlin. 
• Wyndham Garden, Dresden, Germany.  I remember walking such a long walk to my room but the buffet dinner was awesome. :)
• InterCity Hotel, Nuremberg, Germany.   I can't remember a lot about this hotel except that it was directly across Sheraton Hotel in Nuremberg and that beside it was the best Italian restaurant I've been to {Osteria, was what it was called} 
• Holiday Inn, Munich South, Germany. Like the other Holiday Inn in this list, I am not a fan of the hotel because they charge you for wifi, so thanks but no thanks. It was especially unnerving too, because I guess there were about 40 of us, so they moved everyone in our group to the meeting room downstairs and created an informal buffet table which made the lines slower and longer. I've stayed in other Holiday Inns, the one in Toronto, and it was a nice one though.

Overall:

Hotels in Germany are generally not too spacious -- so don't be surprised to see your room when you do go. Toiletries are not all included, so you may have to ask for it from the reception, or if you're like me, I just bring my own in several small bottles. There are no laundromats {hehe, this is not the US hehe} but the breakfasts, overall is just amazing. Everything is fresh, yummy and overflowing. And always, whenever you're going on a trip, remember to check reviews online! :)

Happy Monday!
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xx