Goodbye to the Pension

There is a Starbuck’s right catty-corner to the Vienna StaatsOper, just across the street from the Hotel Sacher, home of Sacher torte, the ultimate Viennese artery-buster. There was a terrific uproar when Starbuck’s moved into this coffee-shop city just a few years ago. But I suspect the battle is over, and that Starbuck’s has won. The best cup of coffee I had in Vienna last week was at Starbuck’s. And what with the reputation of the old coffee houses for inefficency and hauteur, I do not see how the old coffee houses can survive.

Just down the street from Starbuck’s is another anachronism: the Pension Suzanne, one of the last (I suspect) of the classic family-run “hotels.” If you are of a certain age and class, you spent a fair amount of your adult life in pensions. You will remember them tucked away opportunistically in the spare corners of office buildings, or upstairs over family restaurants, or otherwise eking out the limits of the available resources. They offered bed, sometimes breakfast, and varying degrees of hospitality and efficency. I remember convoying my family across Europe in the summer of ’74: we had to catch an early train from Amsterdam to Frankfurt, so the proprietor left us a stack of sandwiches (cold cuts and cheese on white bread) on the front counter, in lieu of the morning meal. In ’85 and ’87, I enjoyed extended “teaching summers” in Rome, the guest of Norbert Pelzer on the second floor of the Villa Helene, upriver from the Piazza del Popolo: he was civil and courteous and he fielded inquiries in half a dozen languages, although he never did seem to be able to get the hot water right. Around the same time my daughter, by now an adult and living in Germany, furnished us with a German-language tour guide to Greece, which fitted us out with any number of similar accommodations, quirky, well-scrubbed and cheap.

I’ve mostly drifted upscale since then. Sometimes it was the client who paid, but advancing age and a modest increase in solvency have made their mark. The pensions have found their demographic niche contracting, just as the Barbarian horde of down-market motel chains moved in as competition.

I should romanticize too much: I’ve stayed in pensions that would give the willies to Norman Bates –lumpy mattresses, greasy wallpaper, paper-thin walls and neighbors who kept you awake with their spasms of ecstasy. There’s a reason why I tend to deploy my travel dollars elsewhere. But they’re part of the texture of the time. The Suzanne is, I suspect, one of the last of a dying breed, and travel will have lost a particular flavor without them. Besides, at a derisory $140 a night, how can you possibly go wrong?

Footnote(s) on upmarket hotels: We did stay at the Suzanne last week, although I admit we spent most of our jaunt in far more up-market digs--the kind of place where if you are not careful, you wind up spending $46 for a glass of OJ and a bowl of bircher museli. Just two quick.beefs about the upmarket segment. One, I guess others have remarked on it, but I still marvel at the fact that the more pricy the hotel, the more likely you are to be nickled-and-dimed (or Euroed-and-Kronered) to death with extra charges. And two, the upmarket segment has importated a particularly unattractive feature of the United States hotel trade: the accordion bill, which expands before your eyes. If a pension tells you the rate is 98 Euros, then 98 Euros is what you pay. If the hotel quotes you 250 Euros, then you can be pretty sure it will be 250 plus this tax and that tax, and just about any kind of fee the febrile imagination of the desk clerk can conjure into being.

Actually, that last may be only one beef in two parts, so here is another: the price of hotel laundry. I've paid less for a room in a pension than the price they charge you to clean a tee-shirt these days at an upscale hotel. At these prices, it would make sense to FedEx the stuff overnight from Budapest to Mumbai and let the locals down there beat it on the rocks.