Travel is often presented as a race from one attraction to the next. Yet for travel writer Tim Richards, some of the most welcome moments come when the sightseeing stops and the hotel-room door closes.
In the Polish mountain town of Jelenia Góra, Richards found himself asking reception in hesitant Polish: “Czy masz czajnik?” — “Do you have a kettle?” The answer was yes, allowing him to retreat upstairs with a pot of herbal tea and several quiet hours before his train departed.
He had a choice between leaving at 5.30am or waiting until 12.30pm. Having already covered the town for a travel guide, he saw little reason to sacrifice sleep for an unnecessarily early journey.
Instead, he lingered over a generous Polish breakfast of bread, cold meats, cheese and pickles, returned to his room and read until checkout. The fruit tea that followed was another small pleasure before he continued his journey.
Richards admits that hotel rooms are not usually the main attraction of his trips. For much of the time, they are simply places to sleep after a day spent exploring. Their size, decoration and level of luxury rarely matter if the location provides a convenient base.
But a room can take on a different importance when a deadline arrives.
At such times, Richards puts the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door, gathers the kettle and coffee sachets, if they are available, and turns the room into a temporary office. With a tablet and portable keyboard, he can spend half a day writing while the rest of the itinerary waits outside.
Why hotel rooms can become useful travel offices
There is a particular calm in being confined to one place during a busy journey. The usual decisions — where to go next, what to see and how to get there — disappear for a while, leaving only the work in front of him.
During a 2025 Eurail journey across Europe, Richards used a writing session in a single room at Bucharest’s Hotel La Bohème to complete an article about managing without a mobile phone. The hotel occupies the historic Casa Oprea Soare in central Bucharest, close to the Old Town, but the room’s appeal on that occasion was less its setting than its quiet and skylight.
On an earlier trip to the United States, he worked from the Sheraton Grand Seattle on a piece about Australian food and coffee in Los Angeles, a city he had just left. In Würzburg, Germany, an urgent rewrite required an earlier start: sitting on the bed at 6am, he reworked an article about Hawaii’s Tiki culture on an iPad before going down to breakfast.
Poland has provided another memorable workplace. In 2015, after travelling by train from Vienna to Katowice, Richards shut himself away to complete a piece about a tour of locations associated with The Sound of Music in Salzburg. The article was needed to mark the film’s 50th anniversary.
Unusually for a Polish hotel, the room had an electric kettle. That detail made the long writing session considerably more comfortable as he typed, drank hot beverages and prepared the article for publication.
The arrangement may lack the glamour commonly associated with travel writing, but it offers something equally valuable: a pause. A hotel room can become a refuge from timetables, crowds and constant movement, as well as a practical place to finish the work that makes the next journey possible.
For Richards, the pleasure lies in knowing that the pause is temporary. Once the copy has been filed, the tea finished and the checkout time reached, the door opens again on the next destination.
