W What do Falco, Coco Chanel, Leonard Cohen and Udo Lindenberg have in common? They all lived in the hotel for months, years or decades. Lindenberg still does it. And they all feed the myth of the long-term guest as a bohemian who doesn’t believe in domesticity and instead sees the hotel suite as his natural habitat. Benjamin from Stuckrad-Barrealso a notorious hotel guest, The taz summed it up like this: “Misery begins when you cook at home.”
The reality couldn’t be more opposite. Most long-term guests are not such an exclusive clientele, and they often do not do this voluntarily. It is the circumstances that force them to do so. This could be your background, an infirmity, your professional situation, that your own apartment has become temporarily uninhabitable or that you have even had to leave it completely and are now unable to find a new one. Then you just get a room.
The permanent guest in the country is the mechanic. I like this clientele, I have gotten to know them well over the past few years. Because if you, dear readers, hardly want to imagine a so-called technician’s room – the fitter feels the same way, based on experience. And he is grateful when he gets a simple and clean hotel room instead.
The fitters who stayed with us, some of them from Monday to Friday for months, worked on large construction sites. Firstly, because the A3 motorway from Frankfurt am Main to Nuremberg will have been renovated and expanded by the end of 2025, and secondly, because the railway line between Nuremberg and Würzburg received a general overhaul in 2024.
As hosts in our small inn, we definitely wanted to make a contribution to improving the infrastructure in Germany. So we set the breakfast times earlier and the arrival times on some days far later, and our clichés about construction workers and craftsmen were confirmed as often as they were corrected: Yes, this part of the hard-working population can eat tons of sausage rolls with black coffee at half past five in the morning. But he also values domesticity and regularly has household items with him, such as framed family photos, pillows, a television, a coffee machine and always slippers.
It only became a bit borderline when – very rarely – stovetops or mini-fridges appeared among the items. Because, dear Benjamin from Stuckrad-Barre: Misery is when you have to cook in your hotel room.