Beyond Condé Nast: Shedding Light on Hotels

For someone whose living depends, in part, on writing about travel services, I feel oddly indifferent toward hotels – to my mind, the point of travel is not where you sleep, but what you do. So long as I have a good firm bed and a hot shower, in reasonably quiet surroundings, I’m pretty satisfied. I’ve never been impressed with five-star rankings as such, largely because to my mind they’re pretty meaningless unless you have no intention of ever leaving the building.

That attitude dates from my earliest trips to Latin America, in the mid-1970s. Before then, I had visited Mexico several times, but really only the borderlands, and had never quite placed the country and the region in any conceptual framework. It was in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, in the state of Chiapas, that I first really appreciated the contrast between the smug comfort of the First World and the Spartan utilitarianism of the Third.

There, on a truly shoestring budget, I stayed in a six-bed dormitorio with five other gringos for five pesos each - at that time about US$0.40 per night. On one particularly dark and drizzly day, most of us remained in the room reading, with the door shut to keep out the cold, and we switched on the light - a 25-watt bulb (approximately four watts per person) hanging from the ceiling. Soon thereafter, the passing owner noticed the faint light escaping the room, opened the door and flipped it off with the admonition that “Electricity is very expensive!” For many years after that moment, I continued to spend much of my travels in what, later, I came to call “George W. Bush rooms” - they all had dim bulbs. Even though, as I’ve gotten older and appreciate greater creature comforts, I can’t resist rating hotels not by stars, but by wattage.

That’s why, when I read trade magazines such as Conde Nast Traveler, I still cringe when, in their annual “Hot List” of the world’s best new hotels, they boast that some of them cost less than US$300 per night (in the current issue, that comes to 62 of the 154 mentioned). Still, I always look to see how many hotels appear from my region of choice. This year’s list features just one hotel from Argentina, but four from Chile.

The only Argentine accommodations on the list is Recoleta’s Hub Porteño (pictured at top) which, though I have not stayed there, I did pay a visit in December. This 11-room hotel is little unusual in the sense that it’s an all-inclusive facility; Argentina’s all-inclusive hotels, of course, are more often guest ranches and isolated resorts than urban enclaves. As you might guess from its Francophile look and location (adjacent to the similarly exclusive but substantially larger Park Hyatt Palacio Duhau), it’s not in the “Under US$300” category.

In Chile, I have in fact stayed at Hangaroa Eco Village & Spa (pictured above) which, however, was in marcha blanca (roughly translatable as “soft launch”) when I last visited Easter Island a year ago. Unfortunately, when I visited Valparaíso in the same month, the recycled Victorian Hotel Palacio Astoreca (pictured below) was still undergoing its transformation from a crumbling Cerro Alegre mansion to an elegant new boutique hotel. It’s one I would be curious about staying at and, astonishingly, it still falls into Condé Nast’s “budget” category (which the Hangaroa most assuredly does not).

One of the Chilean entries is the Hotel Surazo, a modern seaside hotel in the central coast town of Matanzas which, prior to its listing, I had never even heard of. There is also the all-inclusive Hotel Refugia which, apparently, hopes to turn the city of Castro in a luxury gateway to the Chiloé archipelago. I can’t give any of these star classifications, but they’re all upwards of 100 watts.

Paine's Road Back; Chiloé Update

In the aftermath of the recent wildfire at Torres del Paine, the Chilean government is trying to do what it can to salvage the season – whose peak is normally January and February – in the country’s iconic national park. With that in mind, they’ve adopted measures that can only be described as small-minded: in the country’s costliest park, whose entrance fee for foreigners is roughly US$30 (Chilean residents pay about US$8), they have decided to allow children under age 15 in for free.

This is a half-hearted measure at best. Many if not most of Paine’s visitors are foreigners, and very few of them bring children under age 15. Chilean families do, of course, but a relative handful of them are trekking the backcountry as most overseas visitors do. It’s hard to see this as an effective incentive for foreign visitors to head to the gateway city of Puerto Natales (whose economy depends on the park) and on to Paine, given the publicity the fire has gotten and the fact that the Argentine settlement of El Chaltén (pictured below), which offers comparable trekking in the adjacent Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, costs nothing to get in (other sectors of the park, most notably the Moreno Glacier, do impose a charge).

I’ve always objected to differential fees for foreigners, which both Argentina and Chile do in a haphazard manner, and not only because it’s flagrantly discriminatory (and don’t get me started on “reciprocity fees”). As a policy, differential charges assume that foreign visitors are more affluent that locals, even if they’re from neighboring countries. From a long-term perspective, it makes a bad impression on budget travelers who, if they make their initial visit as peso-pinching backpackers, might refrain from returning as prosperous professionals.

Still, if the government really wanted to make an impact, it might announce, for example, that park entrance would be free of charge for January and February, or perhaps even through April (when the trekking season ends for all practical purposes). Alternatively, it could include Paine in the new national parks pass, announced last year, that permits entrance into all Chilean parks, except for Paine and Rapa Nui (Easter Island) for one calendar year.

Meanwhile, last Sunday’s New York Times revealed its list of 45 places to go to in 2012, and two of them were in southernmost South America: Chilean Patagonia (No. 8), and Chiloé (No. 37). Both figure prominently in the new third edition of my Moon Handbooks Patagonia title; for the former, the Times mentions two new Paine-centric properties, Tierra Patagonia and The Singular, that opened only very recently. The other property is one that’s nowhere remotely close to Patagonia, though it does enjoy a spectacular location less than two hours from Santiago.

For Chiloé, the Times notes that “President Sebastián Piñera has plans to share the island with the rest of the world,” but inexplicably overlooks any express mention of Piñera’s spectacular new Parque Tantauco (pictured above and below), a conservation and tourism project that I explored last February. It does mention the new airport near the city of Castro, which will improve access to the island, and environmental concerns over a 56-turbine wind farm. But the failure to mention Tantauco borders on negligence.