You guys, I could not put this book down. It was also kind of like eating a Twix bar hidden in a Fiber One bar wrapper, because whenever anyone asked me what I was reading and I said that it was a memoir about the hotel industry and I couldn’t tear myself away from it long enough to function, for whatever reason the topic struck people as a much more dry and scholarly than it was.
And I really don’t know why – what goes on in hotels? Sex, extramarital sex, sex for money, weird sex, celebrity stays, drugs, lingerie parties, people trying to do the weird shit that they do at home in a foreign environment, confusing tipping conventions, tired travelers acting like assholes, and a veneer of extreme customer service that does not exist in nature and absolutely has to be covering some kind of dark underbelly (spoiler: it absolutely is).
No, rather than being a dry book-form documentary on hotels, this is crass, inappropriate, raunchy, and hilarious. It also has a lot of legit tips for getting the most out of your hotel stays, which is useful if you travel more than I do.
If you read this and enjoy it and would like another book about a field that requires an intense level of professionalism but is staffed primarily by young men, who are inherently anything but, that is also crass, hilarious, and appalling, allow me to recommend A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic’s Wild Ride to the Edge and Back by Kevin Hazzard. It has a similar tone. I want to find a hundred more just like them.