Cheap Hotels

This book makes me want to pack my bags and go! so badly... and at the same time it evokes happy memories of sunny, adventurous, and spectacular trips. Leafing through this book is like digging out your shoe box full of photographs -- just better. You see the pictures that YOU would take -- of the places that YOU would check into, and you will find yourself marvel at memories that you have yet to make. This book is not meant to be a guide -- it rather is a combination of art book and photo album. It combines pictures and little stories of more than 200 friendly, welcoming, and caring budget places around the world -- many from Asia and South America but also finds in the US and Europe. The list of addresses in the back enables the reader to directly contact the hotels for reservations. However the book is a huge inspiration to forego the depressing chains on your next trip and rather go search for these happy-making gems. When I am in need of a mood-booster I just love to spend some time in the travel section of a book store and "plan" my next trip. This book has the very same uplifting effect with one variation: It focuses on the place where you are STAYING rather than the place you are GOING. This concept is a bit baffling but makes sense: The place you are staying replaces your home for the time of your trip and should be oozing just as much hospitality as the town or country you are visiting -- without eating up the best part of your travel budget.

The photos are what lead me to enjoy this book. Unlike many other books on travel this is more of small notebook on places to have a good rest and a surprising new view. Too many books miss bringing the feelings one has had on the road, this one doesn't. It attempts to get that across in the writing and the photos, the brevity of words does reflect how some experiences have no words.So far have kept this book close to me to get a feeling during those times when something different is needed. The few friends I've given this book to have enjoyed receiving it.

"No hotel room has yet changed my life," begins Daisann McLane in Cheap Hotels, "but many of them have made me, unexpectedly and inexplicably, happy." This book makes me inexplicably happy. McLane loves travel for all the right reasons, and her joy is infectious. A many-decades veteran of "blind dates" with cheap hotel rooms the world over (as Frugal Traveler for The New York Times, editor and columnist for National Geographic Traveler, and longtime cultural observer for Rolling Stone, Vogue, the Village Voice and others), McLane knows her way around a ryokan. This book is her unabashed love letter to all the places from Bali to Bangor where she has "found happiness." A keen and ideosyncratic observer, brilliant writer and gifted photographer, McLane ferrets out and photographs -- gorgeously -- the grace notes that define a culture: the fragrant frangipani on her pillow in Rarotonga, the elephants parading beneath her window in Madras -- even the killer bedspreads that attack her in lodgings from Texas to Tokyo (do you know how often Motel 6 washes its bedspreads? McLane does, and she is not amused).A far cry from the featureless, fashion-slave catalogues that pass for most travel guides, Cheap Hotels is a touching personal memoir that wraps itself around you like the beautiful, white, all-cotton sheets in McLane's beloved Hotel Castelar in Buenos Aires. Which is not to say McLane is uncritical: trained as cultural historian, she is crack-smart and very funny -- a great travel companion. Bryan Burkhart's strikingly attractive design so perfectly complements McLane's vision that is hard to imagine one without the other. Compleat with tricolor, trilingual text (English, French and German) as befits its global theme and Taschen imprint, Cheap Hotels is a handsome coffee-table artifcact: a lovely art book, poignant memoir, cutting cultural critique and super travel guide. And, it makes me laugh. Ok, I'm crazy about Cheap Hotels. For I, too, love to travel -- and now I remember why.

After I opened Cheap Hotels, I kept repeating "I love this book!" First, it's handsomely printed and bound in Germany. The photographs, speaking their own language, are numerous and wonderfully colorful. The text is in English, French and German, reminiscent of operating instructions. As you peruse it you become not an armchair traveler, but a bedside traveler. The beds (and various amenities) pictured can be had for from $4 to $185 per night (strictly speaking the $185 room has two beds). There's a location on the globe for every adventurous soul.This book is at least as much of a bargain as these rooms.