Your Source for Creative Travel Guides
Origins
Heavy Flight (Orange County Airport, CA: July. 2023)
This travel review site was born on a March afternoon in the lobby of The Signature at MGM Grand in Las Vegas. I had booked a suite there after I scoured hundreds of user reviews on various travel sites and tracked prices across the Las Vegas hotel spectrum for weeks.
Once inside, I realized I had cobbled together a mere patchwork dream of the hotel. Spackling the gaps for other prospective travelers would require getting granular and describing everything about the accommodations – or at least everything I noticed as a traveling poet.
Desert Life
Palm Springs, CA (Oct. 2024)
Desert Death
Yermo, CA (Jan. 2024)
Why Creative Travel Guides?
The Hotel Poet travel blog fuses the best aspects of traditional user travel reviews – anecdotal insights into comfort, price, and quality – with the captivating narrative qualities of literary travel writing.
It forages for overlooked glitz and murk on journeys and holds them up to the light for prospective adventurers to consider for themselves. Think of the Hotel Poet as a tour-guide-meets-travel-agent who knows the best places to stay along with how to make the best of any travel experience – even a cheap one.
You can use these travel guides for genuine insight into a destination you’ve been planning on visiting or merely as blueprints for how to apply a poet’s lens to your sightseeing experiences.
What You’ll Find Here
Every Hotel Poet travel guide consists of a series of individual reviews, with each post reviewing a specific element of a real trip I’ve taken. Read all together, the reviews form complete travelogues.
For example, readers seeking info about Ontario Airport parking can easily find that travel information in the Ontario International Airport essay in the Transportation Category.
However, they can also follow the Hotel Poet from the Ontario Airport parking lot, onto a Frontier Flight, into the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, into a Thrifty Rental car, then around Conyers, GA, and finally, onto a comfy king mattress in a suburban Airbnb – all via the Conyers travel guide.
We all must start from somewhere, and where we start from changes our narrative. Since Southern California is my home base, certain logistics of my journeys will be most relevant to residents of that region.
At the same time, I hope that stratifying trips into hyper-concentrated reviews of destinations, transportation, lodgings, and things to do makes them more relevant to folks from different places. As the Hotel Poet becomes more specific, it becomes more universal.
Ultimately, these creative destination guides aim to offer insight to anybody who plans to take even a few footsteps along the same paths I’ve chosen.
Regardless of setting, each travel guide can be used as a tool for learning how to travel creatively. This means that even as logistical details such as prices and amenities change – or even if whole buildings disappear – the poetry of experience within the essays remains evergreen.
The Hotel Poet will even attempt to cover return trips – those melancholic (or, occasionally, relieved) exoduses from both a location and a vacation. Where other travel blogs teleport back home, the Hotel Poet recognizes that driving on the other side of the highway can conjure up a completely different travel experience. I can’t guarantee the return travel essays won’t be bittersweet, but sometimes the best poetry only arrives after a farewell.
The Four Parts of Travel
The Hotel Poet’s travel guides are organized around the four primary elements of a typical trip, with each described in granular detail.
DESTINATIONS
Destinations are not just about where we want to go, but why. Get ready to explore everywhere and anywhere – from world-class vacation spots, to mere blips of cities – via imagery and insights about:
TRANSPORTATION
Travel is ultimately about going elsewhere. It’s along the way that we remember the most. The Hotel Poet deciphers modes of travel, along with the nitty-gritty of the supporting infrastructure, such as:
HOTELS
As its name suggests, the Hotel Poet is particularly interested in hotels. The granular reviews on this travel resource site cover the full gamut of lodgings, from questionable motels, to mega-resorts, to privately owned vacation rentals – all while chronicling essentials such as:
THINGS TO DO
To travel like a poet is to be entertained by even the seemingly mundane at your destination. Have you ever taken an impromptu botanical tour in a vacant lot? The Hotel Poet demonstrates how to have better fun on trips by balancing creative recreations with the best traditional tourist activities, including:
Who This Helps
Hotel Poet trip reviews are geared toward thrifty travelers. When you’re putting a full paycheck into a trip, the stakes are higher to have a good time. And if something goes wrong, most folks don’t have the funds to pivot to a new plan.
The problem is that budget accommodations inhabit that questionable range from actually pretty good to really, really bad. Of course, reading more detailed travel guides won’t ensure you have a good stay elsewhere, but these articles can help you find out things you didn’t know you needed to know in the places you wanted to go.
These travel guides are also mentality guides: when an unfortunate event inevitably happens and threatens to ruin the whole vacation (see The Great Thrifty Debacle), you just have to remember to think like a poet.
That’s because poetry is all about grubbing up the oomph of life in the most dreary places, from detours to delays.
Travel Photography
Every creative travel guide should include photos. No matter how good the prose, humans still love to see with their own eyes. Every review on the Hotel Poet features original photos, unless I forgot to take them.
In that case, you’ll find a lot more words. But don’t worry – poets are made of light-sensitive material and we capture photographic imagery everywhere we look.
The pictures on this site focus on practical details of destinations for prospective travelers, along with uncanny elements. Indeed, any poet will tell you that seeking photo opportunities exhumes squiggling bits of poems, until our brain folds pulse with sights and words.
I can’t imagine a better way to spend my time as a human than studying light.
About the Author
I’m a poet perpetually goaded by wanderlust. However, because I earn my keep as a mere library assistant, I learned how to travel with limited money and time off.
Luckily, I’ve mastered how to use my poet’s toolkit to extract glimmers and glowing memories from even a hard-boiled egg at a dirty Vegas diner. Look, there’s Cassiopeia twinkling in the paprika sprinkles!
When I’m not turning travels into text, I’m writing about literature on my other blog, notesofoak.com, or playing cricket with socalwomenscricket.com.
All of my trips are self-funded and self-coordinated, and almost always involve my trusty travel companion, “B”, who tolerates my frequent stoppages for potential poems.