Condé Nast The sexy side to an overnight stay is obvious to couples: complete liberation from the everyday, whether chores or children. The hotel is an obligation-free zone: romp in the bath and you don’t have to worry about cleaning it afterwards – housekeeping will see to that by folding the towels, making the bed, and handling everything mundane that might stymie sexual moments in everyday life; hang the Do Not Disturb sign on the door and you truly will be left alone.
If Condé Nast can say it, so can I: <i>Sex is best in hotels.</i> Over the last few years, travel writers and researchers have more or less confirmed what couples have always felt – sex is often better in hotel rooms than at home. It is not about “kink”; it is about atmosphere, freedom, and a break from routine.
Condé Nast Traveler summed it up perfectly: hotels are where people go to feel “more glamorous, more anonymous, and a lot more free than they do at home.” When you close that heavy hotel door, the laundry basket, the inbox and the neighbour’s dog stay on the other side. That small distance from everyday life is often all it takes for couples to relax, reconnect and remember why they like each other in the first place.
Psychologists talk about novelty and “self‑expansion”: new places and small adventures make us feel more alive and more open. A hotel stay, even just a night in your own city, gives you permission to be a slightly different version of yourself – and that version usually has more time and energy for romance
HealthDigest Perhaps, the solution could be hotel sex. Apparently, it’s better. For starters, you’re miles away from your responsibilities and mundane routines. This can promote feelings of relaxation, which in turn can put you in the mood for sex.
A recent piece in The Times by travel writer Lizzie Frainier puts it beautifully: “Stop trying to make hotels sexy — they already are.” She points out that long before anyone added “intimacy kits” to minibars, hotels were where people went to feel a little more glamorous, a little more anonymous, and a lot more free than they do at home.
What makes hotel sex better, she argues, is not props or gimmicks but possibility. A different room in a different place lets you step out of your everyday roles for a night – no school runs, no spreadsheets, no broken dishwasher. That sense of possibility is deeply romantic, even if all you do is share a bottle of wine, take a long shower and sleep in clean sheets that someone else will wash tomorrow.
For us, this is exactly the point: a good hotel does not have to try hard to be “sexy”. It just has to make you feel safe, cared for and a little bit elsewhere.
The Times For me, the true allure of a getaway is straightforward: it’s the experience of being in a new place, becoming a different version of myself. All I seek from a hotel is to support that vision.
Now to Lisbon. Getting a proper hotel license here is not exactly easy. The process is expensive, time‑consuming and full of bureaucracy. That is one reason why hostels and Alojamento Local (AL) became so popular: for years, they were the easiest way to open something in hospitality and get enough beds to make a small business possible.
If you turn a flat into a hostel with dorms and bunk beds, you can suddenly offer a lot of pillows in a small footprint – and that can make the numbers work when you are starting out. Shared bedrooms and common bathrooms are great for budgets and backpackers.
But they are not exactly the first places that come to mind when you think about romance and privacy. Who really wants to make love in a crowded dorm with strangers on the other bunks?
We prefer cozy, relaxed and romantic hotel rooms where you can close the door, exhale, and feel like your time and space really belong to you.
We only create things we genuinely enjoy ourselves – small hotels we would actively choose when we travel. For us, the ideal is a charming, intimate hotel in a real neighbourhood, with cafés, street art and local life on the doorstep rather than souvenir shops and queues.
We like being spoiled by staff who make the bed, clean the bathroom and care about whether your breakfast is relaxed and tasty. We like slow mornings, friendly “good nights”, and the feeling that someone is quietly taking everyday tasks off your shoulders. Those are the details that make a hotel feel more romantic and more “stimulating” than an apartment where you still have to take out the rubbish.
Maybe I am old‑fashioned. But after more than 30 years of travelling together through hundreds of hotels, hostels, Airbnbs, private rooms, hammocks and everything in between, we still come back to the same conclusion the magazines and the researchers suggest: sex really is better in hotels.
It is better because hotel rooms give you time, privacy and a small break from being the efficient version of yourself. It is better because someone else does the boring work in the background while you focus on each other. And it is better because, for a night or two, you get to live inside a different little story – one that starts when you turn the key and ends when you drop it at reception and step back into real life.
Thomas
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