Hotel Breakfast Versus Walking Two Streets
· 1 min read
The included breakfast is rarely the best breakfast within five minutes of the hotel, and working out when to skip it is a two-minute calculation.
Hotel breakfast solves one problem extremely well: you do not have to decide anything. It is downstairs, it is paid for or nearly, and it is running at the hour you happen to wake up. For a working trip with a nine o'clock start that is often the correct answer and the rest of this is noise.
But the buffet exists to feed a hundred people a version of everything, which means nothing on it was made for the moment you took it. Eggs held in a tray, bread from yesterday held warm, coffee brewed for volume. If you are in a city for two mornings and one of them is free, the buffet is the wrong way to spend it.
The two-minute calculation
Look at what the hotel charges if it is not included. If breakfast is fifteen and you would spend eight on the street, you are paying seven for the convenience of not walking — that is a real trade and sometimes worth it. If it is included, the cost is only the walk and the risk of the place being shut.
That risk is the part worth reducing before you sleep, not after you wake. Check hours the night before, pick two options rather than one, and prefer places that open early enough that you are not the test case. A list ordered by distance does this quickly; a list ordered by anything else — including this site's paid ranking, which is a ranking of who paid and says so — will not answer the question of what is open at seven within four streets of where you are standing.
