About
Step into my shoes.
I am Nik. I go to hotels, I sleep in them, I photograph what is actually there, and I write down what I would tell a friend the night before they left.
Wheresnik is two things at once, and it works better if you know which is which. It is a magazine, and everything in it is free to read. It is also a private advisory, which is how it pays for itself. The hotels I write about are hotels I have stayed in. When one of them is right for you, I can book it for you, at the hotel's own price, with things attached that you would not get booking it yourself.
There is no office, no team and no newsletter you have to join to read anything. There is one person who travels a great deal, takes too many photographs, and has opinions about which floor to ask for.
The method
Every piece opens looking down.
Each inspection begins with a photograph of the ground and my own shoes on it. It started as a habit and turned into the way I work, because the floor tells you things the brochure will not. Whether the stone was laid or stuck down. Whether the grout has been kept. Whether the carpet in the corridor has been replaced since the refurbishment or only the one in the lobby. A hotel is maintained from the bottom up, and the bottom is the part nobody styles for a photoshoot.
The rest follows from the same idea. I walk the property the way a guest does, at the hours when it is busy and again when it is empty. I eat in the restaurants on more than one night. I use the spa, which is the facility most people in my position never find time for and the one that separates a serious hotel from a decorated one. I ask for the room I would want and I tell you whether I got it.
What goes on the page
Five notes in public. The rest comes with the booking.
Every inspection carries five notes, and they are the five I would give away at a dinner party: which building, which floor, what to book before you arrive, when to go, what everybody gets wrong. They are free and they are the useful ones.
The list does not stop at five. The table numbers, the staff to ask for by name, the rooms I would refuse, the thing that is worth a quiet word at check-in: that part goes to the people who travel with me, before they leave. It is the only thing on this site that is not public, and it is the reason the rest can be.
What I actually do
A trip is a sequence. Somebody has to decide it.
Most trips are more than one hotel, and the decisions that matter are the ones a booking page cannot make for you. How many nights in each place and in which order. Which island you fly to first, so that the weather on the second one is still on your side. Whether the drive is worth doing yourself or whether the hotel should send a car. Where the week you have chosen is the wrong week, and what to do about that.
I say no more often than people expect. There are hotels on this site I would keep you away from in August, rooms inside them I would refuse at any price, and beaches that photograph better than they swim. That judgement is the part you are actually getting, and it is the reason the five notes on each page stop where they do.
Where I do not know the ground myself I use people who do. Active travel in New Zealand and Fiji goes through Tamarillo, run by people who live there and have done it for years.
How a booking works
I choose the room. The agency holds the reservation.
Wheresnik is an independent affiliate of Classic Travel, a New York agency working from Madison Avenue since 1982 and a member of Virtuoso. The preferred-partner agreements with the hotel groups are theirs, which is what puts breakfast, a credit and an upgrade onto a booking at the hotel's own published rate. They hold the reservation and take the payment. No card details pass through me at any point.
What I do is the part before and after: choosing the property, choosing the room inside it, knowing which week is wrong, and staying on the booking from the first email until you check out. Write in English, Italian or Spanish. I answer personally, usually within a day.
Outside the groups
Some of the best ones pay me nothing.
Small houses and small brands with no agency agreement at all. They are on this site because leaving them out would turn it into a catalogue of the hotels everyone else lists, and when you want one I write to the owner myself.
See the independents →Start here
Tell me where you want to be.
The place, the month, who is travelling, and what the trip is for. I come back with one or two properties, the room I would take in each, and the notes that stay off the site.
Scrivimi Write to me Escríbeme →For the record
Member of the International Food Wine & Travel Writers Association and of the International Travel Writers Alliance. Photographs on this site are my own. Properties are visited in person.
Write to me at nik@wheresnik.com, in English, Italian or Spanish. I answer personally, usually within a day. There is also a form, if that is easier.