Swiss photographer Roger Eberhard traveled to 32 different countries in the course of 365 days and stayed in 32 different Hilton hotels, one for each country. He was shocked, shocked to discover that—guess what? Hilton hotel rooms look pretty much the same no matter whether you’re visiting Panama City, Capetown, or the good old U.S.A.
The 32-year-old Eberhard has written up his appalling findings in an 88-page book, Standard, in which he presents a photograph he has taken of each Hilton double room where he stayed, always shot from the same angle, and of the view of each city that he got from his room (the views are pretty much the same, too: mostly ambitious urban skyscrapers, although the Capetown view shows a ratty rundown cityscape that must date from the early 20th century). Here is an excerpt from the Amazon blurb for Eberhard’s book
Of course Eberhard could have saved himself the trouble of embarking on a full year of arduous travel to discover that Hilton hotel rooms are “almost interchangeable” had he done the following before he took his first air trip around the world instead of afterwards:
When I read about Eberhard’s book, in a Q&A with him in the Washington Post’s Sunday travel section, and looked at the photos of the “almost interchangeable” Hilton rooms, my first thought was: These rooms look great! They looked sparkling clean, which is the first thing that nearly every hotel guest wants (along with no weird or unpleasant smells), and they fulfilled the second chief requirement of nearly every single hotel guest on the face of the earth: They looked as though no other human being had ever occupied that room. I’m no super-world traveler, but I’ve stayed in enough different kinds of lodgings both in the United States and abroad to give a lot of kudos to the Hilton hoteliers for figuring out what its customers desire.
In short, “almost interchangeable” is the gold standard of hotel construction and management. For example, all the Hilton hotels—indeed almost all hotels and motels on the face of the earth these days—feature the snow-white, easily laundered cotton duvet cover that has all but replaced the icky floral hotel bedspread of yore. Whenever I checked into a hotel or motel during the pre-white duvet cover days, my first move was to throw that bedspread, which obviously hadn’t been dry-cleaned after the previous occupant checked out a few hours before I arrived, nearly completely off the bed. Who knows what had taken place atop that bedspread before I got there? Sex? A pizza party? A mishap involving someone’s carsick children? The white duvet cover is now so ubiquitous—and so attractive to consumers—that there is an entire retail industry devoted to replicating the blinding Arctic Circle hotel-room experience in one’s own bedrooms at home.
In his Washington Post interview Eberhard said, “I like small, quaint hotels that offer a decent standard. I like it when the person in the lobby is also the owner and we get little tips for the city and it feels a little bit family.” I’ve stayed in some of those, and I like them, too. But finding them requires some research: leafing through Fodor and the Lonely Planet, or getting a reliable recommendation from a friend or trusted travel agent. More often, “small” and “quaint” mean uncomfortable and stuffed with ghastly tchotchkes that are supposed to signal the proprietor’s arty or charmingly eccentric tastes—and “family” consists of a chatty-Cathy hostess quizzing you about your “American” political beliefs and intruding on your vacation. This is why I generally avoid B&B’s and would never stay in an Airbnb (I don’t want to open a drawer and discover someone else’s underwear).
The Hilton family has been successfully running hotels since Conrad Hilton built the first one bearing his surname in 1925. They know what people want out of a hotel—and that’s why they’ve made it “standard.”
