Why we book hotels without breakfast for city trips
For most people booking their hotel, including breakfast, seems to be a no-brainer. But not for my wife and me.
Her is why:
My wife and I like to travel. In the last years, we have visited London, Vienna, and Munich several times. Also, we were in the Austrian mountains and spent from time to time a weekend in small bathing resorts at the North Sea.
For a long time, we booked our hotels with breakfast.
The buffets were abundant, and it was merely practical to go to the hotel restaurant tomorrow after taking a shower and get breakfast immediately.
But one day, when we booked a trip to London for the first time, we read the reviews of our hotel on the internet.
Many tourists wrote that breakfast in this house was wholly overpriced and that one could get better and cheaper food in every pub in the surroundings.
For the first time, we decided to book without breakfast and instead try a different location near the hotel every day, where breakfast was also offered.
And the people from the rating platform were right. Outside the hotel, we got a delicious breakfast for about half the money we would have paid in the hotel.
Besides, this way we got to know many lovely pubs in the city.
You only pay for what you choose
Why is breakfast so expensive in the hotels? If one takes a look at the wide offer at the buffet, one quickly understands this.
The hotels try to offer something for every taste. There is fruit, cereals, bread, sausage, English breakfast, four different juices, salads, eggs — absolutely everything anyone would eat for breakfast.
Every hotel guest pays for this variety, even if he perhaps only eats scrambled eggs and sausages, but does not like fruit and cereals.
But if you go to a breakfast restaurant, you can choose what you want to eat and only pay for that. You don’t have to pay for everything else on the menu.
You get to know great locations
If you have to think every day about where to get your breakfast, you might also drive to areas further away from the hotel, if you have seen on the internet that there is a perfect breakfast place there.
In London, we immediately tried several pubs on our first trip. If we only wanted to have a beer in the evening, we would probably have always gone to the same pub.
Many pubs also specialize in breakfast. We would never have visited some locations if we hadn’t been looking for a delicious breakfast.
You get more variety
In most hotels, the breakfast buffet is the same every morning. Sometimes there are small variations, but on the whole, it’s the same every day.
Outside the hotel, many breakfast bars compete with each other for customers and have to come up with some ideas to stand out from the competition. Therefore the offers of the individual restaurants often differ clearly.
We have learned to appreciate this variety very much and don’t want to miss it on our travels anymore.
The exception to the rule
Despite the described advantages, we still sometimes book the hotel breakfast today. Whenever we don’t travel to big cities, we always make use of the hotel’s offer.
In smaller towns or villages there are of course not many possibilities to get a good breakfast outside the hotels. Especially at the German North Sea coast or in the mountains of Austria, there is hardly anything else left to us than to book the hotel buffet.
But these are exceptions for us today. Whenever we can, we try to eat our breakfast somewhere else every morning.
Probably with a little more effort and the willingness to travel longer distances, this would also be possible in smaller places. But we don’t want to make that much effort.
Sometimes the hotel buffet is the better choice.
Conclusion
Anyone who likes to travel to big cities should try not to have breakfast at the hotel.
Not only will you save a lot of money, but you will also get to know many great locations, eat a variety of food and even meet locals.
The hotel restaurants are full of tourists, but in the city locals also eat in the breakfast bars. And that’s what travel is all about: To immerse yourself in other cultures and to gain diverse experiences.
I would be happy to hear in the comments from you how you do this on holiday. Would you rather go to the hotel restaurant or the city for breakfast? Let me know. I am very curious.
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