On Lodging

Most of our traveling decisions boil down to "accept less to do more."  In lodging terms, this means we accept less comfortable quarters, where we know we aren't going to spend a lot of time, and focus instead on what we are going to do with the balance of our time and money.  This leads to a lot more cabins and tent camping than hotel rooms; we save hotel rooms for days where we know that a good night's rest is an absolute priority (at the end of a 15-hour drive) or when the room itself is part of the experience (the Cape Lookout cabins, or the Fairmont Empress in Victoria, BC).

When we do choose something beyond basic, spartan accommodations, the first factor that influences the decision is the experience: is the place we are staying something that can be easily replicated somewhere else? For instance, from the first trip, we felt it unlikely that we would find an Airstream easily unless we went out and purchased one ourselves, and while the interior accommodations were about the same as any other hotel room in the same price range, the exterior was more interesting than any of those would have been.  If it seems just as likely that we're going to be just as happy in another setting, we generally move down the list.

The second factor that influences us is travel distance.  If we are looking at a long-haul kind of day, longer than twelve hours of projected travel time, chances are we will choose a hotel, all other options being equal.  There are exceptions - we camped inside Grand Canyon National Park rather than take a hotel, never mind that this added several hours to an already-long driving day - but these are generally covered by "the experience," above.  If we're talking about a shorter day, but still likely to arrive at an hour where we are unlikely to want to set up a tent, we generally choose a cabin.  If we are talking about a short day, usually six to eight hours' projected travel time, we generally go with a tent.

The third factor is generally cost.  Experience shows that hotels are more expensive than the other options, but the cost difference between tents and cabins may be small enough that we're willing to splurge on a cabin just to avoid the extra half-hour involved in setting up a campsite, and the security of having a roof overhead in case the sky opens up or the temperature drops unexpectedly.  Sometimes the difference is so significant (such as within most National Parks) that there had better be a pretty significant experience edge to the cabin over tents.

A further factor that influences our planning, but is unlikely to influence most people's, is proximity to a military base.  Since military installations' on-post lodging is guaranteed to be at local government rate, and therefore significantly less expensive than off-post, we consider that an acceptable price to pay.  Often, the nearest military installation is an hour or so out of town, such as Camp Parks outside San Francisco, but reasonable overnight lodging costs trump being five minutes away from everything under the sun.  The Department of Defense has made a concerted effort to improve and standardize lodging post-to-post, most of those being under the IHG umbrella in the Army, meaning that the average military installation's temporary lodging feels more like a Holiday Inn than anything else, because it is a Holiday Inn.  There are also more flexible lodging options on most installations if you do a little digging - the Marines' Camp Pendleton, outside Oceanside, has two hotels, both of reasonably good quality and excellent customer service, and an array of beachfront cottages, which, if you qualify, are cheaper than the hotel rooms for more amenities, better view, and greater privacy.

The last significant factor on the planning side is proximity to our route.  This is last because generally we can find something conforming to the three other criteria somewhere on our route, so how far out of the way we have to go to get there becomes a last-case sorting criterion between otherwise equally good options.  For instance, we have at least once chosen to push on another two hours rather than set up tents, because we knew there was a hotel available slightly farther down the road, and we knew the quality of rest we would get tenting was not good enough to justify the cost savings.  In this case, we were willing to push a hundred miles further down the road to position ourselves better for the next day.

Finally, because we do a considerable amount of traveling each year by normal standards, we wind up sticking to particular brands.  Our experience has been that Hilton hotels, specifically in the Hampton Inn budget line, tend to meet our needs pretty well.  The breakfast is never spectacular, but it's reliable.  The rooms are consistent across the brand; newer rooms tend to be better, but we've never had an experience where we would refuse to stay if we went back to any particular Hampton Inn.  It does not hurt that typically they are available at government rate.  Same goes for anything in the IHG family, which, at the moment, has the Army's on-post temporary lodging concession.  Our preference off-post and outside hotels is first for camping in state and national parks or forests, and second for KOA, which, like the hotel chains, tends to have at least a minimum threshold of acceptable, and go up from there.  Since KOA cabins can run half the price of a room at the expense of an in-house bathroom, we've gotten used to the short hike over to the communal bath.  Tenting is even cheaper, and if you have an RV, you don't even have the problem of hiking to the bathroom.  KOA is the only one of the options listed that has a fee on its rewards program, but that fee, as of 2015, is $26, for 10% off.  If an average cabin is $50, that pays itself off in five nights.  Our family-visit trips tend to run three nights minimum of travel in each direction, so it pays itself off in a single trip for us.

Again, the principle is "accept less to do more."  Since we don't tend to stay in one place more than one night at a time, and we tend to be moving rather than static, we are willing to accept compromises in lodging quality that might not be for everyone.  However, we find that this works well for us.  It lets us stretch further in what we can do, and puts us in a better situation to sustain that pace of five hundred miles a day.