The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
The long-stay hotel guests who book in for months (or even years)
Sally Howard meets the people who aren’t just on holiday, they’re choosing room service and turned-down beds as a way of life
Most of us enjoy the suspension of day-to-day reality – not to mention cookery and piles of laundry – that comes with a hotel stay. What’s not to love about waking to a prepared breakfast and returning home to a neat bedroom with fresh sheets and your soggy towels miraculously spirited away?
For a growing number of Britons, however, this experience – #hotelife in social media parlance – is becoming a months-long, or even year-round, affair, as factors including the stalled housing market, the rise of digital nomadism and the emergence of the London TWTs (Tuesday to Thursday city-workers) revive a lifestyle once reserved for the elite.
Hotels have always been a retreat for the rich and famous: Marilyn Monroe occupied a suite above the Hotel Roosevelt’s Tropicana pool for two years from 1948, cementing the hotel’s position in Hollywood lore; billionaire recluse Howard Hughes lived in the presidential suite at Desert Inn Las Vegas for four years of the 1970s, alarming chambermaids by strolling about naked (apart from a strategically draped napkin).
New York’s storied Hotel Chelsea was home to many of the 20th-century’s glitterati. It was here that Dylan Thomas succumbed to pneumonia in 1953 and where Janis Joplin had a tryst with resident Leonard Cohen (room 424, immortalised in Cohen’s explicit Chelsea Hotel #2). The imposing Victorian gothic pile also served as the backdrop for the shoot for Sex, the ex-rated 1992 opus by former resident Madonna (who lived at the hotel, which reopened in 2023 after a huge renovation project, in the early 1980s).
“I’m in starry company, then,” laughs Carole Railton, 70, a body language expert who recently spent three months living at two London hotels following the sale of her Islington home. Railton’s first port of call was the 2018-launched Moxy London Stratford, where she paid £120 a night for a bright modern room with views over east London and enjoyed the 24-hour hubbub and coworking areas. “The young staff were really switched on and helpful, and leapt to help me when I got my suitcase jammed in a revolving door on arrival: it was a joy.”
Less successful was a stint at brutalist landmark the Tower Hotel in St Katherine’s Dock, where Railton paid £255 a night on a long-stay deal. “It was an older hotel and my needs were a bit at odds with the tourists who were the main customers,” she says. “I ended up moving rooms three times during my stay because of various issues, such as cleanliness and noise, which are magnified when you’re there long-term.”
Laundry, a perennial problem for hotel-dwellers, was solved, says Railton, by finding a cheap dry cleaner near the hotel and “washing my knickers in the sink and hanging them in the shower – that old trick!” Though Railton often found herself skipping included hotel breakfast pastries and fry-ups for lighter fare bought elsewhere. “I got quite addicted to in-room Deliveroos, too!” she recounts.
There are distinct cohorts among London hotel-dwellers, says Rhianne McIlroy, of prime property agent Middleton Advisors. “You get the people who moved out of the capital during the pandemic, who use a hotel as their London base when they work in town; trusted mid-range hotels that they’ll come back to again and again.” She continues: “Then you get high-net-worth people who are used to having staff such as nannies and chefs and see hotel living as a way of replicating this without the capital outlay of a London home.”
It’s this latter demographic, spending around £5,000 a night for home-awayfrom-home suites, that luxury hotel brands target with what are known as “residences” – basically high-end serviced apartments. These include Marriott International’s Autograph Collection, which offers two- and threebed residences with luxury hotel modcons such as chauffeurs, pet care and floristry; and Four Seasons, which has residences and “retreats” in destinations including London, the US and Thailand.
Alejandro Reynal, Four Seasons’ President and CEO, said that the brand is rapidly expanding this portfolio to respond to the growth in luxury longstay hotel guests, with retreats launching in Cabo San Lucas, Belize, the Dominican Republic, Cairo and Colombia in the next two years.
Of course, at the other end of the spectrum, and in the teeth of the UK’s housing crisis, councils resort to budget chains as emergency accommodation for the homeless. Cornwall Council uses budget chains including Travelodge and Premier Inn to provide emergency housing for hundreds of families priced out of the county’s longterm rentals, in part owing to the much-reported loss of Cornish long-let rental stock to Airbnb.
Dr Charlotte Russell is a clinical psychologist and the founder of The Travel Psychologist. She says that individual experience of hotel-dwelling will depend on whether the lifestyle is borne out of choice or necessity. “Our homes provide a sense of physical and psychological safety and so living in hotels, with their insecurity and lack of individuality, can have a negative impact on mental health,” she says. “On the other hand, a wealthy person might choose to live in a hotel for the freedom and flexibility it provides for them.”
It’s telling, she adds, that the examples of women who lived in hotels in the past – Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor (who lived at the Hotel Bel Air) – “were from eras when women were less able to exercise a choice to live independently”.
Kate Smurthwaite, 47, represents one of the more fortunate categories of hotel-dwellers. In 2021, the comedian and sometime digital nomad left the UK and the third pandemic lockdown for Fihalhohi, an island resort in the Mal
LUXURY
If you happen to have $17,500-ish a month to spend (from £1,200 to £2,000 a night) then check into this Manhatten grande dame that has played host to many long-term New York residents.
Long-stay guests receive perks such as a valet, 24-hour room service and even a weekly credit to dine in the hotel’s plush restaurant, Majorelle, with its pretty pink exterior. dives, where she lived for five months in a sea-view double with a terrace for a bargain $80 per night half-board, leaving her housemates to feed her cat Sidney back in London.
Some aspects of hotel dwelling in paradise were idyllic, Smurthwaite recalls, although others were less so. “It was gorgeous for the beach and weather,” she says. “And dining on buffets for breakfast and dinner was great fun at first, though the dishes, a lot of them soaked in mayo, got repetitive.”
Chief downsides were the impracticalities – she invested in a mini fridge, washing line and a stash of pot noodles half way through her stay – and the loneliness. “I’d meet lovely guests, but they would leave after two weeks,” she says.
In Dubai, long-term hotel living is an established accommodation option. Telegraph Travel Dubai expert Sarah Hedley Hymers, 49, has lived in an apartment in the emirate’s IHG Voco Bonnington Hotel for 10 years. She says downsides include a “sky-high” quarterly service charge but that the sense of safety appeals. “I know there’s a team of doormen looking out for me 24/7.”
For Hedley Hymers’ husband Paul, there’s another attraction. “He can get a pint of Guinness delivered via room service whenever he fancies one and the hotel’s full English and Irish breakfasts are the best in Dubai,” she laughs.
In 2022 Lauren Tickner, a 25-yearold Briton, went viral with her YouTube video espousing the benefits of living in a £2,933-a-month Dubai Marriott hotel suite. “It makes me feel like a kid again as I have all my stuff done for me,” the online entrepreneur said. Tickner added that #hotelife was a means of “protecting her energy” by not having to deal with “landlords or utility bills”.
Anchalika Kijkanakorn is the managing director of Aleenta Resorts, which has properties in Thailand favourites Chiang Mai and Phuket. They host retired British “snowbirds” escaping British winters for months at a time and offer a range of discount packages for longer stays. “Long-staying guests want to see familiar things,” Kijkanakorn says. “They want the same room, the same flowers in the garden. We get to know their habits and the off-menu food they like and we have PJs and bathrobes with their initials reserved for them.”
Railton, now happily installed in a long-let apartment at St Katherine’s Dock, advises would-be hotel-dwellers to look to modern hotel brands that offer extras such as postal services and coworking zones. “Older tourist hotels don’t really work,” she says.
Smurthwaite’s experience as a Maldives hotel resident became the touring comedy show The Last Mayor of Fihalhohi, which garnered rave reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe. She says in summary of her experience: “If life circumstances dictated, I would definitely do it again – now I have my mini fridge.”