The more you travel, the truer it is that you gotta savor the good stuff, the smallest of wins, because you’re taking plenty of losses out there on the road these days. The modern travel experience is filled with dreariness and doldrums, and therefore it’s imperative that you relish the unexpected pleasures wherever and however you can find them.
While we’re all familiar with many of the purest and largest travel pleasures — such as an upgrade to a business class ticket, perhaps — other wins may be a bit more esoteric or unusual, but should be celebrated all the same. Their quirkiness may even make them all the better to enjoy. When you get tagged with another flight delay, or stuck with another windowless window seat, bank on these incredible, underrated moments of bliss, the unheralded small joys that end up as huge game-changers for the frequent traveler.
The Early Check-In You Didn’t Expect
The 3 p.m. check-in is the global standard, but if I show up to a hotel unannounced a few hours earlier, I’m at least hoping my room is ready. Noon is pushing it, but at 1 p.m., you feel like you’re walking in with a puncher’s chance.
Any earlier than that, unless you paid to reserve it, you’re playing the waiting game. When you’ve landed in Europe fresh off a red eye flight, that means you’re tired and irritable and have now been consigned to mandatory aimless wandering and bleary exploration for the next four-to-six hours. Maybe more. Except sometimes, the check-in gods smile down upon you.
I once landed in Paris at about 8 a.m., and after a taxi from CDG, the Relais Christine told me my room would be ready in 30 minutes. Is it any surprise the luxe left bank boutique is my favorite hotel in Paris?
On a recent jaunt to Barcelona, our inbound flight from New York landed at an unseemly 6:30 a.m. We made it to the Hotel Arts Barcelona by 7 a.m., put down our bags, grabbed some complimentary coffee and were then told our room was ready. We hadn’t even considered the possibility, and so we screamed in delight, high-fived in the lobby and then put those coffees right down, as now we could just go pass out in bed instead of force-caffeinating ourselves into wakefulness. An unexpected early check-in this extreme produced a moment of raw celebration that I’ll never forget.
The Perfectly-Timed Housekeeping Service
Even at many of the world’s top five-star hotels, the machinations of housekeeping are difficult to discern. That knock on your door could come at 8:45 a.m. or 2:37 p.m. on your first day, and then as soon as you course-correct your schedule to allow for theirs, it may well flip to an alternate extreme by the next.
If you’re out of the room for 12 hours per day, it may not seem like a huge deal, but after a busy day of sightseeing, when you’re ready to pass out in jetlagged exhaustion, coming back to a room that hasn’t been made up yet is a downer. Your water hasn’t been restocked, and you’re not supposed to drink from the tap in this particular part of the world. Your towels haven’t been changed and your bed hasn’t been made, and the cleaning crew is on their way to take care of that for you as soon as you close your eyes for a quick power nap.
But the well-oiled hotel senses your movements with subconscious precision. Is there a video camera in my room? Did they know it the second I left? I wouldn’t even be mad if by the time I came back from a 22-minute breakfast my room was spick and span.
Of course, expert hoteliers do track the movement of their guests, if in less invasive ways. The most consistent, best example I’ve seen of this was at the Four Seasons Tokyo at Otemachi. Each morning when I popped down to the gym, I put on the green-light indicator for my room to be serviced, and after an hour of attempting in vain to sweat out that second bowl of ramen I didn’t need to consume, my room was crisp and clean and waiting for me to muss it up again. Bravo.
An Ode to the Airport Shower, an Underrated Travel Hack
Instead of whittling away time at the bar, book a shower suite insteadThe Favorite Movie on the Flight
The new releases section of most in-flight entertainment units is atrocious. They were new six months ago, and they weren’t even noteworthy at the time. Good luck if you’re on a foreign carrier who has a catch-all Hollywood movie heading, with everything else being a local release. Instead of gambling on the latest and greatest must-misses that bombed out of the theater after a two-week run, opt instead to find a go-to or two, and watch them on every flight.
Hear me out. You put it on. You don’t care if you go to sleep; that’s ideal. You wake up to the credits, you restart it, you laugh at your favorite scene, you go back to sleep. Don’t act like you don’t behave like this at home, either. I damn well know that if Goodfellas is on television, I’ll be watching it for the 342nd time, and by watching it, I mean flipping to the channel it’s on and leaving it playing in the background while I continue doing whatever else I was already doing.
For my travel partner in crime for the past year, it’s Anyone But You. She’s watched it beside me so many times that I can intuit, with frightening accuracy, when she’ll be laughing at one of her two or three favorite scenes. Then she’ll be knocked out cold while I’m still scrolling and trying to find something to watch, ending up side-eye ogling Sydney Sweeney on her screen regardless. Thanks for the life lesson.
The Favorite Lounge Snack
Buyer beware when it comes to the food and beverage quality available in most airline lounges. You’re not even paying for it; it’s free, and it still seems like a poor deal half the time. When you find something that’s as good as gold, that’s consistent from one visit to the next whether six weeks, months or years apart, well, you keep going back to that well.
I actually get excited when I know I’m connecting through Frankfurt or Munich on a Star Alliance route to Europe, because I know my first stop at the Lufthansa lounge — well, my second stop, after a long-awaited, soul-nourishing airport shower — is to snag a warm, melted cheese-coated salted pretzel. That sucker is gonna be there whether it’s 5 a.m. or 8 p.m., but yet it’s fresh and tasty and miles removed from the gruel they were trying to feed you on board.
In Tokyo, whether Haneda or Narita, the ANA lounge is guaran-damn-teed to have an automated, perfect-pint-pouring beer dispenser. If you’re one of my 12 followers on Instagram, you’ve seen me film this at least a dozen times. It’s not a schtick; it’s unbridled appreciation. I’m having that beer whether I was craving it or not because there was no way I was whiling away an hour in there without using that blessed machine.
The Plane That Takes Off Immediately
The plane that takes off immediately upon turning down the runway produces a near-unsurpassed feeling of sheer giddiness. Let’s call it the No-Stop Takeoff, or maybe the Rolling Stop, because it’s that same driver’s test-crushing mistake that is actuated by only the most expert of pilots and in turn inspires awe in even the most jaded of travelers.
You’ve been taxiing down the tarmac for 10 minutes — or if it’s JFK or Istanbul or another super-hub, it’s been 42 minutes and there are still eight planes in front of you. About 97.3% of the time when your plane makes the final turn onto its designated runway for takeoff, your plane idles for a moment or two. You imagine your pilot is double-checking switches and ten-fouring the tower on the radio and whatever the hell else it is they’re doing up there. Are the flaps down? Up? Let’s get ’em sorted, whichever way they’re supposed to be.
But this time you don’t wait at all. This senior captain you have running the show, rocking who knows how many tens of thousands of hours of flight time, has sorted all that minutiae out already. This time, this absolute legend of a pilot makes her final turn onto the runway, rolls the plane into its straight, front-facing alignment and with not a millisecond of hesitancy, proceeds to gun it into a Rolling Stop Takeoff. For the rest of us who only get to pilot our cars around town, it’s approaching a red light and having it turn green before you ever even take your foot off the gas and begin to lose momentum, let alone step on the breaks.
This certified Top Gun you have up there has the final clearance and knows she’s next to depart. She has the coordinates, the co-pilot has gauged the gauges, the flaps are flapping, what’s the damn delay? Let’s get the hell out of Dodge. This PhD-grade pilot is determined to shave a minute or two off your ETA and isn’t taking no for an answer. No stopping and waiting necessary. It’s a well-planned, to-the-T No-Stop Takeoff.
It’s a rare moment. Savor it.
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