The Sunday Getaway - 08 09 2024 - Temporary Guest

It’s a weekday afternoon and I find myself in the south of Athens waiting for a business partner to join me for a chat. We’re meeting at one of the newly launched luxury hotels in what has already been a 10 minute wait for me. It’s a vast complex of buildings with multiple areas to unwind, a couple of pools and restaurants with guests dispersed here and there. Instead of being glued to my phone tending on tasks and various chats, I opt for the real world and start noticing the crowd.

My business partner has to leave after our brief lunch and I’m left finishing off on the Greek salad and other delicacies on the table. Soon enough my battery will die, I think, and so I move indoors closer to a power outlet. The kind waiter is very attentive, tending to every single thing I ask and right after sitting me at a table, he offers a coffee on the rocks. I quickly take a bathroom break, leaving my laptop and all of my things behind, feeling secure enough they will wait for me when I get back. It’s refreshing to feel at ease whilst you’re tending to your business day, just as if this was home.

It’s been a few hours now at the property and I’m drawn into its unique feeling of the temporary guest. And that’s when I wonder what it would be to live in a hotel? To swap home for a serviced room or apartment for a month or season. One where you get to take advantage of what’s on offer whenever you feel like it. Be it the daily specialty coffee drip, the squeaky clean laundry or the readily available food. But above all the people that swirl around the property being open and relaxed. What if you could stay there for a few months? Or what about maybe for a year or two?

No, not the fantasy of the bad-ass millionaire heir in the Beverly Hills 90210 TV series, but a more downtempo one. Haven’t you been at a company offsite where you spend the week at the same site? That ease of being, where everything is taken care of and you immerse yourself into the daily rhythm of the surrounding guests. The American couple dressed in baggy clothes sipping bright-colored cocktails early in the pm, the business folks at a working lunch striking a new deal, the multi-gen family from different parts of the world that finally got together after months. Everything and anything.

If you could be a temporary guest, where you would go?

Travel On.

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