There are plenty of hotels where you can get multiple rooms and a washing machine. When traveling with kids, one big advantage of hotels is predictability.
The last thing I want to do when I'm pulling in after a long flight an hour past the kids' bedtime is to deal with potentially dealbreaking problems with the place. In a hotel, they generally have maintenance on staff and extra rooms to switch into in case of problems. Generally with Airbnb, the staff is 30 minutes away and is annoyed that you've called them. Most of the time, everything is fine, but there can be snafus with locks, plumbing, cleanliness, etc, and kids make these more complicated. This is all not to mention being asked to strip beds, take out trash, etc, after you've paid thousands of dollars, including cleaning fees for the place.
A trick is to know which brands you need. Marriott's Residence Inn is a big reliable one (for multiple "rooms" and kitchen/laundry) that exists almost everywhere in the US. It's a part of the whole Marriott system and often in tourism lulls in various cities has deals that keep it comparatively well priced with other Marriotts in that city and will let you use Marriott points to further defray costs.
Hilton and IHG both have similar brands, but their exact names escape me at the moments. The search keywords are "extended stay" and "apartment hotels".
Depends where you are. Maybe in expensive cities where space is at a premium. But suite hotels (with various levels of kitchenette/kitchen) in the US are not, in my experience, notably more expensive--though often have simpler facilities--than more conventional hotels. (Bedroom may not be actually a different room from living room area but is often at least somewhat separated. So may not help with kids. Stay in this type of hotel in the US a lot.)
The parent led off with the value of having a full kitchen, which you have dropped—obviously because there are extremely few hotels in the U.S. that include this.
Your description of how well hotels are run does not match my experience. I’m sure it’s true of very nice hotels. It’s also true of very nice AirBnB’s! And VRBOs, which are not as well known but similar idea.
There are a whole lot of hotels that include a kitchen in the U.S. Many extended stay/suite hotels have a stove, microwave, utensils/dishes, refrigerator, and some a dishwasher. It's more rare to have an oven, although I have seen it.
There are long-term stay hotels that generally cater to business clientele, plus most of the chains have a laundry room somewhere on premise for guest use.
I haven’t seen one on each floor, either, but that’s still not as convenient as one in the room that’s yours so you can run it while you’re out to dinner or overnight while you sleep. It’s shared so you have to plan around it.
I have stayed at many hotels of varying degrees of quality all over the U.S., and I have never, not once, seen the laundry being used. It’s always been available.
On my trips outside the US, the hotel laundry rooms are usually busy. Enough that many of the hotels show individual machine status from a top-level page in the TV menu.
Do you mind elaboration on at least what region of the world you are talking about? I think this whole main thread is suffering from the globalism v diversity collision; we are a global group of people trying to compare regionally, nationally, local, or even personal experiences that differ so widely that it regresses into noise.
My experience is that e.g. it used to be a lot easier in the USA to find hotels that even just had a kitchenette or even a pay to wash “laundromat” (which is what I assume you are referring to), but maybe that is also just my personal experience. But my sense is that those offerings have been in stark decline especially over the last decades, and especially outside of the inland western half of the country that in some places is still a kind of real America that has not yet succumbed to con job level corporate practices.
It seems fairly accurate to include AB&B in those who have succumbed to “enshitification” for whatever of the several reasons that may be. In the case of AB&B it feels like MBA Wall Street types pressed to slide or chip away at ever more standards to drive “growth” and/or “cost cutting”, the only two real tricks the number monkeys have in their bag.
> My experience is that e.g. it used to be a lot easier in the USA to find hotels that even just had a kitchenette or even a pay to wash “laundromat” (which is what I assume you are referring to), but maybe that is also just my personal experience. But my sense is that those offerings have been in stark decline especially over the last decades, and especially outside of the inland western half of the country that in some places is still a kind of real America that has not yet succumbed to con job level corporate practices.
American here. The opposite is true -- there used to be few of these, and they were "upscale". Now there are tons of different low-end chains that specialize in it. Homewood Suites, Marriott/Hilton/Sheraton Suites, Embassy Suites, DoubleTree, Hyatt Place, Springhill Suites, and maybe half a dozen others.
These are usually, but not exclusively, located in areas that are a bit more rural -- I don't know if you'll find one in Manhattan, for example, and you'll see definitely them by pretty much every major freeway interchange. But I've stayed in one on Maui, in San Diego, and near the airport in SF, so you see them in "tourist" places as well.
No, I just was typing fast and grouped everything together I could think of. Embassy Suites is one of the OG "suite" chains that I'd characterize as "formerly high end, maybe mid-level right now", but YMMV.
I wouldn't characterize any of those as genuinely low-end which I'd reserve for things like Travelodge and below. Probably various shades of the midrange scale with some on the upper and some on the lower side. I'm in a Marriott SpringHill Suits at the moment which is boring but clean and comfortable enough.
Yeah, it varies. I think fundamentally you're paying for square footage, so bigger rooms will always be "mid-market", to some extent. The ones in tourist spots are fancier than the ones by Exit 5A of a freeway interchange in rural Nebraska.
The suite hotel I used in Maui, for example was pretty fancy: pool, restaurant, bar, gym, balcony rooms, etc. But the price point was certainly below equivalent hotels in the same area.
In North America, across hundreds of hotel stays, I have seen exactly zero ensuite washing machines. For extended stays, being able to kick off your laundry and leave for the day is absolutely priceless. Having to set timers and babysit coin-operated laundry on a different floor just isn't worth it, to the point where I'd rather just pay $$$ for hotel laundry service over using their communal laundry room.
A lot of "extended stay" hotels have this. One brand I've used and have had pretty good luck with is Sonder. They're not quite full service -- they have a spartan reception and want you to use their app for everything, but they do have multiple rooms, an adequate kitchen, and washing machines in the rooms.
> There are plenty of hotels where you can get multiple rooms and a washing machine
Ok... Can you show me some like that in the EU?
> This is all not to mention being asked to strip beds, take out trash, etc, after you've paid thousands of dollars, including cleaning fees for the place.
I staid at a hotel in Lisbon [1]that had a kitchen and washing machine. (And a kids club that would watch the kids)
There ended up being an issue with the dryer not drying. So the hotel staff took a laundry basket of clothes and delivered them washed and folded the next morning. That level of service would not have happened in an Airbnb.
Yes, trivially. There are filters for it on booking.com. Here's a link for rooms in Paris suitable for 2 adults and 2 kids with 2 bedrooms, a kitchen/kitchenette and a washing machine.
Most 4 start hotels and resorts have either connecting rooms or family rooms in Europe (the latter especially true for resorts). They are far less common on lower categories though.
I suppose to book connecting room you might have to call sometimes rather than going through online platforms though.
Hotel with kitchenette and washing are not that hard to find either. They certainly more common on location were people tend to spend longer stay rather than in touristic cities were people spend on average just a few nights (ie. mountain and seaside places were people sometimes spend weeks or even months), usually they call them aparthotels or suites depending or something like that.
The last thing I want to do when I'm pulling in after a long flight an hour past the kids' bedtime is to deal with potentially dealbreaking problems with the place. In a hotel, they generally have maintenance on staff and extra rooms to switch into in case of problems. Generally with Airbnb, the staff is 30 minutes away and is annoyed that you've called them. Most of the time, everything is fine, but there can be snafus with locks, plumbing, cleanliness, etc, and kids make these more complicated. This is all not to mention being asked to strip beds, take out trash, etc, after you've paid thousands of dollars, including cleaning fees for the place.