Between the fresh-pressed-and-fluffy sheets, the heaps of pillows a skydiver might prefer over a parachute, and the acres of space to do with what you please, wouldn’t you sleep in hotel beds every night if you could? And considering the average person sleeps for one third of his/her life (time which could be spent watching The Grand Budapest Hotel ~131,400 times — love that movie), it’s no surprise that just looking at a well-made bed does to our imagination what a Thanksgiving dinner spread does to our salivary glands.

In general, an airport hotel is to a business traveler what an MRE is to a serviceman – a no-frills, basic-needs option that never really satisfies but always gets the job done. However, in this gray landscape of conveniently located, utilitarian accommodations, better options exist.

Given the success of Airbnb’s ask to “live like a local,” experience seems to carry more value to the leisure traveler than commodity these days; cultural immersion is all the rage. But if dirty bathtubs, TVs that don’t work, busted furniture, and the occasionalKramer-with-a-spare-key-charging-in-at-inopportune-moments is a little too local for your tastes (and if you left the cramming into chicken buses with nothing but a knapsack and a moleskin back in your early 20s), hotels with history offer a reliable-yet-unexpected sense of place.

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”—Edgar Degas

And independent hoteliers—the folks you ask where to go to take in local culture and where to wash it down at the end of the day—know this sentiment well. After all, part of the artistry of professional hospitality lives in the ability to liaise between guests and their environment—to show them something.

“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.” –Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

To wit: the more we travel, both for business and leisure, the more we learn about the outside world, and, for Calvino anyway, the worlds inside ourselves. Relocation, then, serves as an opportunity to reinvent. And reinvention is not only practiced among travelers; it’s also a booming trend among hoteliers.

The act of standing above the world—on a balcony, on a mountain top, on an international space station—provides a simultaneous sense of freedom from and connectivity to everything in sight.

We often laud our partner hotels for being independent, unique, one-of-a-kind and extraordinary snowflakes that fall from vibrant double rainbows onto pure silica-sand beaches from Maine to SoCal, Washington to Panama. And we mean it. We love our partner hotels. All of them. Equally.

They say going to the gym is the new happy hour. And hoteliers are keen to keep up. Those uninspiring, windowless rooms with milk crates full of rubbery turquoise dumbbells and cheap plastic ab rollers remind us of a time when Cindy Crawford did Pepsi ads, and “Eye of the Tiger” was not only a great song to do push-ups to, but also on the Billboard Top 10 list. Yep, we’ve come a long way.

Today, business travelers and leisure goers looking to take their routine on the road find world-class climbing walls, private pilates studios, and penthouse-level fitness centers overlooking coastal Californian seascapes.