Not Your Average Stays

Somewhere between the algorithm-driven listicles and the cookie-cutter hotel reviews, something essential got lost. Travel writing became a game of SEO optimization and affiliate commissions, where genuine discovery took a back seat to whatever properties paid the most or photographed best. We found ourselves scrolling past the same recommendations, the same superlatives, the same carefully staged perfection that revealed nothing about what a place actually felt like.

Not Your Average Stays exists because we believe you deserve better. Not better in the sense of more expensive or more exclusive, but better in the sense of more honest, more thoughtful, and genuinely worth your limited time and attention.

What We Actually Do

We curate accommodations that resist easy categorization. A Victorian slate mine transformed into sleeping quarters 1,375 feet underground. A transparent capsule bolted to a Peruvian cliff face. A floating pontoon on the Great Barrier Reef where you’re the only guests after the day visitors depart. Cave suites carved into 400-million-year-old sandstone. Treehouses in Thailand’s jungle canopy. Ryokans in hidden Japanese valleys where kaiseki meals arrive according to the season rather than a standardized menu.

These aren’t just places to sleep. They’re experiences that expand your understanding of what accommodation can mean, how hospitality can function, and what travel can deliver when it ventures beyond the conventional playbook.

How We Choose

Our selection process doesn’t involve star ratings, amenity checklists, or price point filtering. We’re looking for something more nebulous and more valuable: properties that demonstrate genuine character, cultural integrity, or experiential depth.

A place makes our collection when it offers something you cannot find elsewhere. Perhaps it’s architecture so integrated with landscape that the building becomes inseparable from its setting. Perhaps it’s hospitality rooted in genuine cultural tradition rather than performance of it. Perhaps it’s simply access to environments or experiences that money alone cannot buy, requiring also commitment, planning, or willingness to accept conditions that five-star hotels would never permit.

We prioritize properties that:

Respect their context. Whether that’s environmental sensitivity, cultural authenticity, or architectural honesty, the best accommodations enhance rather than dominate their surroundings.

Demonstrate actual sustainability. Not greenwashing or token gestures, but operations fundamentally structured around environmental and social responsibility.

Create experiences beyond the transactional. You’re not just purchasing a bed for the night but rather gaining access to something meaningful, whether that’s landscape, culture, wildlife, or simply profound tranquility.

Maintain integrity over mass appeal. The properties we feature often intentionally limit capacity, refuse certain compromises, or operate according to principles that might reduce profitability but preserve essential character.

Not everything makes the cut. We’ve visited properties that looked perfect in photographs but felt soulless in person. We’ve encountered places with genuine character undermined by poor execution or neglect. We’ve seen beautiful settings commodified into theme park versions of themselves. These don’t appear here.

Who This Is For

You’ll find value in Not Your Average Stays if you’ve reached the point where conventional luxury feels predictable. If you’ve stayed in enough five-star hotels to recognize that marble bathrooms and thread counts don’t create memorable experiences. If you’re seeking accommodations that challenge assumptions rather than confirm them.

This collection serves travelers who understand that the most profound comfort often comes from appropriate rather than universal standards. That sleeping in a cave might offer more genuine rest than a king bed in a chain hotel. That authentic hospitality sometimes involves directness rather than obsequiousness. That extraordinary experiences occasionally require accepting limitations that typical luxury would never permit.

If you travel to collect passport stamps and tick off UNESCO sites, this probably isn’t your resource. If you travel to understand how places work, to experience cultures beyond their tourist-facing performances, to push boundaries of what accommodation can mean, then we’re speaking the same language.

What We’re Not

We’re not a booking platform. At least not yet. We don’t earn commissions when you book these properties, which means our recommendations remain uncorrupted by financial incentives. When we feature a slate mine in Wales or a desert camp in Oman, it’s because we believe the experience merits your attention, not because they’re paying for placement.

We’re not comprehensive. Attempting to catalog every interesting property globally would dilute rather than serve our purpose. Instead, we maintain deliberate curation, adding properties slowly and only when they genuinely contribute something distinct to the collection.

We’re not trying to replace traditional travel resources. Guidebooks serve their purpose. Review sites aggregate useful data. We’re doing something different: providing the kind of recommendation you’d receive from that friend whose travel judgment you trust implicitly, who’s seen enough to recognize genuinely special from merely well-marketed.

How to Use This Site

Treat Not Your Average Stays as inspiration rather than comprehensive planning tool. Browse by curiosity rather than strict itinerary. Save properties that resonate even if you can’t visit immediately. Let the collection shape your understanding of what’s possible rather than just where to book your next trip.

When a property captures your attention, we provide enough context to understand what makes it special and whether it aligns with your travel values. We’re honest about limitations, physical demands, and trade-offs. If a place requires hiking through caves or sleeping without climate control, we say so. If it’s genuinely remote or culturally challenging, we explain why that difficulty adds value rather than detracting from it.

The properties featured here often book months in advance, require minimum stays, or operate seasonally. This isn’t accommodation you can book on a whim. But the experiences they deliver reward the planning they demand.

The Evolution

Not Your Average Stays began as personal documentation of places we’d discovered through years of travel, research, and occasionally fortunate accident. It’s evolved into something more ambitious: a counter-narrative to the homogenization that threatens to make everywhere feel like everywhere else.

As travel becomes increasingly accessible and documented, the challenge isn’t finding places to go but rather finding places that haven’t been flattened by tourism into performing versions of themselves. The properties we feature represent resistance to this flattening, whether through intentional design, geographical remoteness, cultural integrity, or operational philosophies that prioritize preservation over profit maximization.

We’ll continue expanding the collection, but slowly and selectively. Quality over quantity. Depth over breadth. Curation over comprehensiveness.

Get in Touch

If you know of a property that embodies what we’re looking for, we want to hear about it. If you’ve stayed somewhere featured here and your experience differed from our description, tell us. If you’re operating an accommodation that resists conventional categorization and maintains genuine integrity, introduce yourself.

This isn’t a static archive but an evolving conversation about what hospitality can be, what travel can deliver, and what accommodation can mean when freed from conventional expectations.

Welcome to Not Your Average Stays. We’re glad you found us.