Over the last couple of decades I got into the habit of sacrificing the creature comforts for other things that I valued more. I don’t have a house or indoor plumbing, but I do have the spare time to research, write, and be creative; I get to travel a bit; I have a lot of kick-ass animals; and I have the holy trinity of personal possessions: guitars, guns, and power tools.

Still, there are times when I want a hot shower, a real kitchen, and a good internet connection. Yesterday I succumbed and checked into my preferred local hotel, only a mile or so from home, where it’s quiet and the rooms have decent kitchens. But now I’m fighting the urge to write a nasty review online.

I won’t do it. Apart from my policy of never writing reviews for businesses in the town where I live, I like the guy at the front desk too much to shit-talk his place of employment. I feel like even though none of my complaints have anything to do with him, he’d still take it personally, and if you knew this guy, you’d understand why I would go out of my way to make sure I never hurt his feelings. He’s just so… nice. Genuinely nice. It’s not an act, and I guess when I come across someone as kind and as good as this person is, I have an inclination to shield him from my negativity.

But I am feeling a bit negative. Usually when I have a bad experience in life, I try to turn it into a positive somehow, so in this case I’ll write about why I left the hotel at two AM, but also how I hope to do things differently one day. With that in mind, here are the strikes against my once-beloved local hostelry, and since this ain’t baseball, there are a few more than three of them:

Strike 1: The room wasn’t ready at check-in time. My friend at the front desk told me they were understaffed, but even so, if check-in is at three, I want in there at three.

Strike 2: The hot water supply is from a water heater in the room, not a boiler. That means the hot water runs out. When I go to a hotel I like to take a hot shower and then soak in the tub for a good, long time. I don’t want to soak in cold water. If it’s not feasible to have a boiler, there are point-of-use water heaters that work quite well.

Strike 3: The building is trying pretty hard to slide down the hill. It’s an old structure and I’m sure it wasn’t built to today’s building code; there’s probably not much the current owner could have done to prevent this from happening, but it’s a pretty serious issue. I could feel the floor sloping, and I could see a curve along the edge of the ceiling, among other tell-tale signs of structural problems.

Strike 4: The kitchen has no pots and pans, dinnerware, or utensils — you have to pay extra for those. There’s something about that policy that feels worse than just charging everyone the extra amount whether they use the kitchen or not. I wanted to cook, but I didn’t want to pay extra, so that meant making a return trip home to get some supplies, and another trip to grab what I forgot on the first trip, and then another trip for what I forgot the second time, and … Pain in ass.

Strike 5: The internet sucks. When it works, it’s better than what I have at home, but that’s not saying much. And it doesn’t always work. I took a Roku with me and it took me seven or eight tries to connect via WiFi. I was able to do software updates on my phone and iPad though, so now I can unlock my phone when I’m wearing a mask. Woot.

Strike 6: The light switches don’t make sense. The bathroom switches are the worst — behind the door on the hinge side, not the latch side. I really hate that, and I hate having to use my phone flashlight in a dark bathroom to find the damn light switches. Also the bathroom fan didn’t work, so I fogged up the whole room.

Strike 7: Small, hard beds with tiny, thin pillows and inadequate blankets — I like to bundle up, but I also move around a lot in my sleep and I lose the covers. It helps to have more than I need so I can find something to keep me warm when I’m half asleep. Not that I ever fell asleep in that room.

Strike 8: Impossibly loud appliances. The refrigerator is insane. The microwave is possibly the noisiest I’ve ever used. And that water heater — it makes noise, too, and it’s in the closet, right next to the bed, with no closet doors to deaden the sound, or cover up the damned ugly thing.

Strike 9: Creaky floors. This hotel is so quiet that when there is a noise, it’s jarring. The person upstairs from me was not stomping around, but there was still no way I could sleep through the sound of that person, I don’t know, rolling over in bed or something. That was the last straw. At two AM I came home and slept on my saggy mattress in my shitty RV, and I didn’t wake up until eight o’clock, two hours later than I normally get up this time of year.

Now for the learning part. I don’t want to be a hotelier per se, but I do have a vision for building a unique, eco/agro-resort, and when I do build it, I’ll apply the lessons I’ve learned from places like this one, and from better-run places where I’ve worked and stayed.

Lesson 1: Under-promise if necessary, but always over-deliver. It should go without saying that if check-in time is three o’clock, the room had better be ready at three, or better yet, at two. If the room sleeps four, the beds had better be queens, not fulls. If you’re touting your HDTVs, you might want to have some HD programming available on them. There’s a strong tendency among hotel-owners to embellish their offerings, and that’s a great way to make your customers feel they’ve been lied to. Because you’ve lied to them.

Lesson 2: Don’t skimp on amenities. If you’re supplying hot water, supply unlimited hot water, preferably in a clean, comfortable bathroom with the biggest, deepest tub you can fit in there. Give people extra blankets, preferably a choice of heavier and lighter ones. Give them more pillows than they need. Have fast internet. Have high-quality appliances. And if there’s a kitchen, make sure there are pots and pans, utensils, and dinnerware, and don’t charge extra for them. You can charge guests for groceries, though — supplying them with a kitchen they’ll want to cook in can be a great way to encourage them to make those purchases, and, speaking from experience, when guests leave a bunch of food behind after check-out, it’s a nice perk for your cleaning staff.

Lesson 3: Build it right and maintain it properly. That goes for major, structural issues as well as little things like the placement of light switches. People feel more comfortable and safe in a well-designed and well-built structure, and people like me will go through and inspect the place for all those details. Yes, bad carpentry and minor code violations do make it hard for me to sleep; I’ll stare at a water stain or an exposed wire all night — can’t help it. It makes no sense because my own place is a dump, but it’s just the way I am. At my own place I know what needs to be fixed, but at your place, I’m not sure if you know what the problems are, and that makes me uneasy. (Interestingly, the farther I am from home, and I suppose the farther from my ‘comfort zone’, the less things like this bother me. I once spent the night in a broom closet in Bangkok and it seemed perfectly reasonable, but I want my hometown hotel to be perfect, or at least considerably better than my home. I guess I’m also willing to endure some discomfort to experience a new part of the world, but in my own town the hotel room itself is the destination, so I want it to be worth my time and money, which brings me to …)

Lesson 4: Make it beautiful. Make it unique. Make it whimsical. Make it weird. Pick a vibe and push it to the limit. Would you rather stay in a hotel room with floral prints and mauve curtains and all manner of tan and beige things, or would you prefer a skillfully executed treehouse, or a houseboat, or a railroad caboose? Which one will be more memorable? From the owner’s standpoint, that drab, forgettable hotel room probably costs more to build than converting the train car, but you can be damn sure it won’t rent for as much per night. Setting aside aesthetics, purely from a business perspective, which would you rather own, a standard, nondescript room that people choose based on its price, or a one-of-a-kind experience that’s booked up months in advance, allowing you to more or less name your price?

I suppose there’s room for both. I have rustic cabins and beach bungalows readily available to me if I’m willing to fork over the cash, but I went for the floral prints and mauve curtains because it was cheaper and more convenient. So I should probably add …

Lesson 5: If possible, offer a cheaper option. There are a few, good reasons to offer a wide range of accommodations in a resort setting: 1) You reach a broader consumer base, which means you don’t have to deal solely with rich people; 2) The wealthy people you do attract are less likely to be the type who don’t want to mix with the poors; 3) Offering multiple ‘tiers’ to your guests essentially allows you to passively advertise your other accommodations to them — your budget guests may save up and come back for a luxury stay, and your high-dollar lodgers might feel like camping next time; 4) You have various other goods and services you can market to everyone, like tours, lessons, food, or souvenirs; 5) Finally, if a couple of buttholes book your place for a destination wedding and make their guests pay their own way, offering budget options increases the chances of people showing up that the happy couple and their uptight parents were hoping to weed out by making their attendance financially prohibitive, and that’s potentially hilarious.

When it comes to my project goals, I must admit that the tourism aspect is in some ways a necessary evil for me; I want to build buildings and make ‘things’, raise animals, grow plants, and cook amazing meals. I’d prefer to spend the in-between times in the water or on the back of a horse. I like the design and construction of the facilities, and somebody has to eat all the food I produce, but I’d just as soon have someone else run that part of the business. Let them deal with the entitled assholes and the oblivious dipshits. Still, despite my disdain, I find I have a firm, abiding belief in treating those idiots well and exceeding their expectations, which makes me wonder, am I in an abusive relationship with tourists?