Nina's Blog - Wednesday 29th April 2026

@ArishMell It's cheap (50 GBP per night), conveniently situated for a lot of small towns I've never visited and has Tesla chargers on site. My experience of Days Inn so far is that they are clean and reasonably well maintained. All I need from a hotel room is a decent bed, en-suite bathroom, cleanliness, WiFi, and somewhere to park my car. I spend most days out sightseeing so the room is just for sleeping, resting, catching up on SW, etc., and perhaps doing a bit of sewing or similar. Fancy decor isn't important to me.

I tried to find a place in the towns nearby (Farnborough, Guildford, etc., but they were all more expensive, even those that had such horrendous reputations on Booking.com that i wouldn't consider them. Anything with reviews suggesting that the place was safe, comfortable, with parking, and professionally run were considerably more expensive.

I'm trying to get this five and a bit month holiday to cost no more than one year of my UK state pension so I'm trying to start cheap so as to have some headroom later :-)

Edit: I misremembered the price it's actually 44 pounds per night. :-)

@ninalanyon Years ago my work occasionally took me away to another part of the country for a week or so. We had a subsistence system whereby you were given a fixed sum, related to your salary, but enough for at least reasonable bed-&-breakfast.

Then the company moved to both "actuals" - what you really spent on hotels and meals, apart from drinks though we were allowed wine for the evening meal (!) - and an insistence on minimum standards of accommodation. The standards included a table or desk in the room, so we could work there in the evenings. Oh aye? Filling in our time-sheets, maybe. They even tried insist we use certain chains.

Do those who create such policies ever have any experience in such working away? It would have cost the firm, hence customer, more, not less than the subsistence method.

In practice we would discreetly ask the bookings people to use our choices, which were normally much better, and cheaper, than the chain ones. No-one queried it. I suppose our local managers knew what we were doing, and why, and were satisfied that the claims were bona-fide. Which they were. We didn't try to fiddle the system, but hiding a couple of pints of ale sometimes meant asking the hotel staff for a rather vague receipt that implied those were part of the meal!

......

The one disappointment I had was that none of the hotels we used had radios in the rooms, only televisions, but they supplied no instructions for the very complicated TV control gadget.

@ArishMell The company I worked for for thirty years did the same. We used to get either a fixed amount dived into two thirds for accommodation and one third for food, local transport, etc. And if either category exceeded the set (and quite generous amount) they would pay the receipted costs.

we were sternly instructed that we were representing the company so we were not to stay in places that we could not take a customer to, and that's reasonable. So I used to rent a flat because I was typically away for at least two weeks at the same location. The accommodation allowance was about a hundred pounds a night and that rented a pretty good flat in the 1990s in Poland.

Then they were taken over by a large international engineering company and the rules started changing, first they insisted on only certain chains as you mentioned, with the connivance of the in house travel agent we ignore that for as long as we could but eventually they forced us to book through the travel agent website instead of by talking to her and later they switched to receipted only for accommodation. As you say, almost certainly more expensive.

@ninalanyon I see your point but what a customer might think or our accommodation did not arise because we worked on his site. His representatives visited our company's premises, not the out-workers' hotels.

I suspect such policies are created by office-bound spreadsheet-jockeys and management-theoreticians who never had to work away from the company head office, apart from occasional day-trips to the company's other premises!

@ArishMell I never had an actual customer visit me at my hotel, except perhaps for the time I was taken back there after a dinner involving the customer factory manager at which I got very drunk. That was in China in the late 1980s and was an immensely positive event!