The Great Roadside Motel Comeback | Hacker News Reader

The Great Roadside Motel Comeback

texasmonthly.com

49 pointsecliptik34 comments

I remember traveling from Texas to Florida back in 1997 with my family to go to Disney World. We stayed in motels all the way and I remember the signs out front saying $25 per night.

I never stayed in a motel/hotel since then until 2010 when some friends and I were planning a road trip. Trying to figure a budget, I figured if I paid doubled the rate I was familiar with for a motel ($25), that we could live like kings. So I asked everyone if our daily motel/hotel budget was around $50 per night and got laughed at pretty bad. Then I did some research and was absolutely shocked.

Those days are long gone. Also, governments around the country recognized they could raise taxes on a certain population that cannot vote against them. So now, hotel taxes everywhere are 15%+.

I laugh when Oregon claims to have no sales tax, and yet hotel room nights have 15% sales tax.

Also, no government/populace is going to approve new construction of cheap motels that could invite drugs and prostitution. So the only new ones have to be ones that cost $5M+ to build. Close to $10M or more in any popular area.

> I laugh when Oregon claims to have no sales tax, and yet hotel room nights have 15% sales tax.

I mean, let’s be fair. No sales tax is extremely nice when buying almost anything, including cars, computers, groceries, furniture, etc. I think it’s pretty great! I’d rather have no sales tax across the board and then a handful of individual items with higher tax.

New Hampshire is like that - no sales tax on most things, but there is tax on things like hotel rooms, restaurant meals, gasoline, and, in effect, liquor (since you can only buy it in state owned liquor stores).

Tourism is one of New Hampshire's main industries. Is it a coincidence that these are things often purchased by tourists? I think not!

> Is it a coincidence that these are things often purchased by tourists?

Ha! Here in Illinois, the hotel tax is insane. But once your stay exceeds 30 days, it retroactively becomes 0%.

Admittedly I live in the middle of nowhere, but I was looking at local motel/hotel prices earlier this week and could get a weekday room for $60. So your route taken might always have been a major factor in the cost, the route to Disney World likely has more cheap lodging than many other routes.

You can definitely still sleep in motels for ~$50/night on a road trip the US. But you're going be staying in a lot of likely-sketchy independent motels next to the highway outside of large urban areas.

No Schitt's Creek mention? I wouldn't be surprised if that show inspired a few real-life motel renovation projects.

reading it, really does seem like Johnny Rose's business plan brought to life.

And really I guess in every organization doing this someone must be familiar with the show, I would think creative marketing ideas / tie-ins might pop up.

The actual motel is for sale:

* https://deadline.com/2021/03/schitts-creek-motel-on-sale-for...

* https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/owner-of-real-life...

There's nothing in this article about if this is a comeback, there is nothing here about year to year bookings, or sales of motels, or anything. Just that some influencer friendly motels are being renovated.

The implication is that someone wrote up a business plan in order to borrow money, made an argument about the near future state of the market that included expansion, and this was bought by the lender(s).

Not iron-clad by any means, but not absolutely nothing either.

Today’s new motels are often branded as “boutiques” and charge four-star rates to match that kind of exclusive service and local experience.

This is ridiculous... The idea of a "motel" is to be cheap. I'm not too fond of this article. It wasn't well written. Nothing great about it. Some chain hotels purchasing old motels and rebrand them. Whatever.

> The idea of a "motel" is to be cheap.

The term just means "motor hotel"; a hotel oriented at motorists, usually with an external-facing door for each room.

Even in their heyday, there were cheap ones and nice ones.

This is part of an ongoing trend of things from the 80s and 90s being rebranded as upscale for millennials who only have fleeting memories of it or family stories about it.

Millennials now have real jobs and real money now so there's money to be made by turning things from that time period upscale experiences for them to relive with nostalgia.

Millennials now have real jobs and real money now so there's money to be made by turning things from that time period upscale experiences for them to relive with nostalgia.

See TV/Hollywood. :/ Tons and tons of remakes. Some are decent enough (the 2017 Duck Tales was solid), but they're pretty clear cash/attention grabs...

It's not really that ridiculous. Clearly the previous business model wasn't working well in the 21st century, so people are innovating.

Boosting profit margin with price hikes isn't innovative.

  > The idea of a "motel" is to be cheap.

Says who?

The stereotypical cheap motel is almost guaranteed to be an unpleasant experience because of the riff-raff it attracts and the extremely low level of service/cleaning. That said, they exist to serve a need, they're not going to go out of business anytime soon.

The "rebanded" hipster motels are quite nice, I stayed at one in Marfa TX and also a different one somewhere in MA. Such motels can only exist if there's enough visitors to make them worthwhile, they also serve a need.

> The idea of a "motel" is to be cheap

The idea of a motel (“motor hotel”) is to be a convenient to motorists, often as a stopping point or destination on road trips by family vehicle. Now, that market historically has skewed more working class than that for “destination” hotels not focussed on motorists, where guests were assumed to be brought to and from the hotel by a driver—taxi, etc.—for the last/first leg, an by longer range owned or hired transport—air, usually, these days—so, yes, on average motels have been cheaper, but that is incidental rather than central to the idea of a motel.

Certainly in the city here, the very last motels and motor courts have a rather terrible reputation, known to law enforcement and EMT alike, though perhaps foreign to fumigators. Further out, though, along the faded remnants of Route 66, you can see any number of ghost motel properties. Some appear shockingly well-kept. Others I have watched decay until finally bulldozed into plots of dirt which hopefully await a gas station.

I do prefer a motel over a hotel: less distance to travel when hauling luggage, a bit more private, which I suppose contributes to that "seedy" reputation. It's just a shame they still seem to cost almost hotel prices.

It'd be an interesting challenge to make Breezewood, PA cool again.

It's interesting that you associate motels with more privacy. In a motel I feel as though everyone knows exactly where I am, whereas in a hotel while I may run into people in the hall, they often won't be able to match me with my room. Hotels also seem to have fewer rooms with the parking lot and sidewalk right outside your window.

In a lot of hotels, getting to your room requires walking though a lobby that’s attended by staff and where there might be other visitors milling about. If you bring an additional guest to your room, those people might notice.

In a motel, the door to your room is probably facing a parking lot. It might be visible from the street, and less private in that sense, but there’s less possibility of somebody noticing who entered the room vs. who checked in.

In Brazil and probably many other places a "hotel" is a reputable place of lodging to which you might take your family, a "motel" is where you go for whatever you might consider "illicit amorous encounters." I just found a book [1] that purports to explore the nature of motels in contemporaneous Brazil.

"..., continuam situados em um espaço liminar, associado à transgressão. Como o modelo de motel norte-americano - um simples hotel de beira de estrada - transformou-se em love hotel ao chegar ao Brasil no fim dos anos 1960?" ... "[motels] ... continue occupying the fringes, associated with transgression. How did the model of the North American motel - a simple hotel by the roadside, transform into a 'love hotel' when it arrived in Brazil at the end of the 1960s?"

Might be an interesting read, I always was curious about that as a teen.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Motel-Brasil-Antropologia-Contemporan... ... "Motel Brasil - Uma Antropologia Contemporanea"

God help us, what does a Holiday Inn mean over there!

A bunch of these (if not all) are overpriced soulless cash-ins aimed at milliennials. Nothing to see here.

A similar article from CA-California’s New Era of Roadside Motels http://www.californiaweekendmag.com/california-boutique-hote...

IDK how most of these are considered motels. Lone Star Court, for example, is basically located in a Mall and it isn’t cheap in any sense. Is it just because the doors open to the outside? Really?

Yup. I think so. My understanding is that enclosed hallways is the differentiating factor.

The other thing that goes along with that is a lack of common areas and services (except housekeeping and maybe a pool)

Yes, no interior hallways and exterior facing doors such that you can go straight from your motorcar to your room = motor hotel = motel.

Last time I stayed at a motel there were fleas in the bed, a toenail clipper in the couch and a cigarette burn through the wall to the outdoors. It was like $80 too.

Think I will pass.

Ah young people with money, surely a grand business strategy

I have Vastly different and Very fond memories of Motels from my teenage years: firstly with my future soon to be ex-wife; and later some of her "surrogates". Just sayin.

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