Hotel rooms

Look at the photo. It shows a hotel room. To be exact, it’s a hotel room in Brønnøysund in Norway. I took the photo when I was there on holiday many years ago. When on holiday, I always take photos of the hotel rooms where I stay. I didn’t get the idea to do so by myself but from the Belgian photographer Johan de Vos. In the 1990s, he wrote columns in the Dutch photo magazine Foto (which doesn’t exist any longer) about hotel rooms: a photo of the room plus a description and a comment. I liked the column and I decided to take pictures of all hotel rooms where I would stay. So, I did. Therefore, I have photos of all hotel rooms where I have spent the night the past 30 years.
The photo shows an average hotel room. Not really big, not really small. I have stayed in all kinds of hotel rooms during the years; small ones and large ones; simple ones and luxurious ones. But most of the time I stayed in hotel rooms like the one in the photo. You find there everything you need for a short stay: a double bed or two single beds (usually I travel with my wife); a bathroom and a toilet; a desk with a chair; an armchair; a mirror; sometimes a small table; a refrigerator, a TV set and sometimes a safe and a coffee maker, too. In the simplest hotel rooms you only find a bed, while luxurious hotel rooms can have much more, like two or more armchairs plus a bigger table; two TV sets; two rooms; two toilets; etc. The most luxurious hotel room I ever had, had a hall and several rooms and toilets; several TV sets and more, although I had asked only for a standard room. Apparently, the hotel was fully booked and therefore I got this apartment, for the price of a normal room, though not the special service that belonged to the apartment. The simplest hotel I ever had was a road hotel: only a bed and a little bathroom with sink and toilet and hardly any space to move. But let’s talk about a normal, average room like the one in the photo; just comfortable enough to stay there one, two, or maybe three nights but not much longer.
Hotel rooms may differ slightly from country to country, but generally they are everywhere the same. Some differences may exist, however. Hotel rooms in warmer countries often have stone floors and no carpets on the floor. The wall decorations and colours used may show regional influences or have regional pictures. However, especially in the bigger cities hotel rooms are the same all over the world, and often when you see only a picture of the room, you don’t know in which country it is; whether it’s a hotel room in Tokyo, New York or Amsterdam. You find differences mainly between hotel rooms in the countryside and in smaller towns. They may have a local look. But the differences are usually in the details.
A hotel room is a kind of passage. Hardly anybody stays there for a longer time. You come, stay there for a while and go. You take a hotel room only because you need or want to do something in or near the place. It is a temporary residence. Before you come there, another person or couple used the room; when you leave, others will take your place. You don’t know these people and you are also not interested to know them.
Just these characteristics make hotel rooms interesting from a philosophical and sociological point of view. They tell us something about a special category of people: travellers. They tell us what they need for a stay. Therefore, it would be interesting to compare contemporary hotel rooms with hotel rooms in the past and look what has changed. Of course, the TV set has been added in the course of the years, and the refrigerator as well; but what more? Moreover, there are categories of travellers. In the past, travellers were mainly businessmen, merchants and rich people with time and money to make a trip and to go on holiday. When other people travelled, they usually stayed with family, friends and acquaintances, or they didn’t go, and even the just mentioned categories often stayed with people they knew. It would also be interesting to compare hotel rooms for categories of people, and to see what is added to a hotel room if it is more expensive. Or to study regional differences, insofar they exist. It would tell us much about people on the way. For aren’t hotel rooms kind of pictorial descriptions of them?