At Hoteligence, we believe where you stay is your first impression of any destination. That’s why hotel reviews are at the heart of the site.
Over the course of my nearly 15 year career as a travel writer and journalist, serving as the hotels editor for the Miami Herald’s Miami.com and the Miami destination expert for The Telegraph in the UK, I’ve checked into hundreds of hotels, interviewing hoteliers, celebrity chefs, mixologists, designers and architects along the way.
Hotels became my calling card, my area of expertise and also a passion. Where I lay my head at night has always been the linchpin of my travel planning. It was one of my earliest travel epiphanies, gleaned from bouncing around Europe for the first time, in and out of hostels and pensiones, in France and Italy, as a college student after studying abroad in London.
Pico Iyer once said, “All you need to travel is wonder and a Swiss Army knife.” I tend to agree. And I suppose my Swiss Army knife—or at least one of its sharpest blades—is the perfect hotel.
Hotel Reviews
I want Hoteligence to be as useful a tool in your travel planning as that Swiss Army knife. The site has soft launched with a handful of Miami hotel reviews, some of the city’s very best and newest properties. In the coming weeks and months, we will be migrating over 200 reviews onto the site spanning North America, Europe, the Caribbean, Central America and South America, which you can search by destination or simply by browsing the latest reviews.
Hoteligence’s hotel intel breaks down everything, from a property’s location to its design, amenities, hospitality, rooms, restaurants, bars and overall value with insider tips and the ability to book directly via Booking.com. (We may earn a commission from hotel stays booked via affiliate links on the site.)
Within the hotel reviews, I’ve planted literary quotes about hotels and travel (some tinged with drinking, longing and love—all preoccupations that, I think, go hand-in-hand with travel) gleaned from my reading as little Easter eggs, just for fun.
“One day, seized by the desire to break up, I decided instead to book a train ticket and a hotel room in Florence for a date two months ahead.”
Annie Ernaux, ‘Simple Passion,’ 1991
I was deep in a study of Tennessee Williams when the first reviews made it onto the site, so you may notice he’s strongly represented. (As it turns out, he’s a great voice on the subject, which should come as no surprise.) Soon to follow are more gems from Annie Ernaux, Joan Didion, Eve Babitz, Shirley Hazzard and others.
Travel Stories
Beyond the practicality of the Swiss Army knife and the perfect hotel, Hoteligence is here to capture the wonders of travel. After all, it’s the moment after you check in that the real adventure begins.
Travel Stories is where you’ll find practical and hyperlocal guides, dispatches from the road, field notes, inspiration, intel, tips, advice, news and more.
We’re headquartered in New York City, so Travel Stories is also home to monthly Best of New York recaps, chronicling the very best restaurants, bars, plays, museums and any other delightful encounters.
Letters & Leisure
“It’s a life of letters and leisure.” This came out of my mouth one sunny afternoon in Brooklyn, on the phone with my dad, sitting in the backyard of a café that, for a time, I ate lunch at almost every day. I had just finished a fattoush salad with spongey halloumi cheese and pillowy soft pita and had been reading in the shade of a honey locust tree with nothing too pressing on the afternoon agenda. It was something of an unexpected cri de coeur; naming the moment and realizing that, for me, those pursuits—letters and leisure—are pathways to the sublime.
Letters & Leisure is a celebration of that sensibility, home to long and short form essays, humor, criticism, experiments and other musings. Think of it as a place to find stories you might enjoy reading while lounging by the hotel pool.
It was conceived in the spirit of what Virginia Woolf wished for women writers in A Room of One’s Own, “to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.”
Subscribe to Our Newsletter
Letters & Leisure is also the name of Hoteligence’s Substack newsletter. We invite you to subscribe to stay in the loop and get the very best of Hoteligence delivered directly to your inbox, from hotel reviews to travel stories, Best of New York dispatches, exclusive content, essays, criticism and more.
A Note on Our Logo
Ed Ruscha has long been one of my favorite artists. I drew inspiration from, what I call, his “word art” in creating the Hoteligence logo, specifically his “Pay Nothing Until April” (2003) painting. I recently discovered, to my delight, that the typography he uses in this painting, as well as many others later in his career, is of his own creation. He calls it “Boy Scout Utility Modern,” which is just so perfect. Funny and cool are words that always come to mind when thinking about why I love Ruscha.
To design the Hoteligence logo, I tapped my old friend Marky Pierson at Wonderdog Studios in Key West. The yellow and blue are meant to represent dawn and dusk. It’s the sun rising on the horizon or the dusk settling in at the end of the day. Either way, the idea is, you’re watching it all unfurl from the comfort of a dreamy hotel room.
Ruscha mounted a major retrospective at MoMA last fall where I came across “Hotel” (pictured at top), a small oil painting on paper from a road trip he embarked on across Europe in 1961, which made me love him even more.
Collaborate
As Hoteligence grows, we look forward to welcoming contributors and expanding our coverage. If you’re a traveler and/or writer interested in contributing, drop us a line. If you represent a hotel that you’d like to see on our site, we’d love to hear from you.
For all inquiries, pitches, collaborations or to simply talk travel, contact us at hoteligencelife@gmail.com.
Thanks for coming along for the ride. It’s going to be a good time.
