17. Plunging into hotel tubs

Why a long bath makes my stay wherever I travel.

My feet, in their happy place, a hotel bathtub outside Lisbon, Portugal.

“Bathroom with shower or tub” is the most frightening sentence I can read in a hotel room description, besides maybe “slaughterhouse view.” It’s the dire possibility that my guest room will have a shower and NO TUB that panics me. When I’m traveling, having a tub to flop into ranks just below immediate access to morning coffee. Wishy-washy either/or statements hit me like a crummy cold shower.

For the privilege of a soak, I’ll check in an hour later, pay for bigger room, or plan my trip around historic hotels with large clawfoot baths. “Some people are just tubbies,” an interior designer once told me during an interview about bathroom trends. I knew she understood my weird, Mr. Bubble-loving tribe.

A Victorian-era illustration imagines an ancient Roman bath.

Humans have been splish-splashing themselves into hot water to get clean and chill out for millennia. Take the ancient Roman plunge pools in Bath, England, or onsen (communal hot springs) around Japan.

Bathtubs starting showing up inside hotels in the early 19th century, though they were still shared affairs until the turn of the 20th century. The now-defunct Statler Hotel, opened in Buffalo, New York, in 1907, claimed to have the first private ensuites with tubs, advertising “a room and a bath for a dollar and a half.”

Sightseeing from the tub

I’ve never paid a mere $1.50 for a place to steep my bod and lay my head. But careful hotel booking (read the fine print, ask for a tub when you reserve) has dipped me into memorable vessels, even as many hotels scrap tubs for showers to maximize space and profits.

Suites in South Africa’s Londolozi Game Reserve come with outdoor tubs—and views of wildlife.

A tub with a view lets you passively sightsee from under a blanket of bubbles. You can go neck-deep in the retro soakers in the Skybox Suites at Manhattan’s Ludlow Hotel, which overlook the jagged rooflines and water towers of the gritty Lower East Side. An outdoor clawfoot at La Serena Villas in Palm Springs provides vistas of swaying trees and mountain skies.

A bathtub at Marrakech’s El Fenn, where rooms blend Moroccan crafts and circus-bright colors.

Sometimes, a tub embodies a destination (and inspires bath remodeling dreams back home). Consider the dramatic, marble-clad oval vessels at Marrakech’s El Fenn, set amid moody color schemes and Moroccan crafts. In our baño at the Casa de Sierra Nevada in San Miguel de Allende, a hammered copper slipper tub gleamed against rugged local tiles. I spent 30 minutes each morning pruning up in it, plotting to replace our 1920s bathtub back home or, at least, to consider a copper farm sink in the kitchen.

In a 19th-century mansion-turned-hotel outside of Lisbon, ablutions happened in a bathroom decked floor-to-ceiling-to-tub with Portuguese tiles. It evoked the Museu Nacional do Azulejo (National Tile Museum) nearby, except the dreamy blue-and-white tiles weren’t behind glass, they were steamed up with use and gloriously alive.

Why I soak

A luxe tub (and ideally, some nice bath salts to go in it) is a decided hotel perk. But I’m also happy in a sparkling clean model at a conference Marriott or a midwestern motel. Running the water, pouring in the shower gel de la casa, and testing the temperature feels like prepping for a religious rite, a little DIY spa treatment. Some people—me included—like it hot, and I inch into the piping water.

A tub at New York’s Ludlow Hotel overlooks the Lower East Side.

These nice long dips rinse off the detritus and dirt travel, banishing the impenetrable dust of Cairo, the chill of a rainy day in Seattle, or the rental car funk from a drive across South Dakota to see my in-laws. The warm water calms my ever-buzzing mind. Whether I bring a book into the deep or just a coffee, a bath provides a few moments away from my phone and a break from my husband asking where we’ll eat lunch.

A shower? They’re useful for washing your hair, but their efficiency smacks of running-late workdays and quick rinse offs after the pool. A bath is a splurge, a soapy time out akin to lounging on the beach or taking a long nap.

A throwback clawfoot tub painted bright blue adds sass to a bathroom at La Serena Villas in Palm Springs, California.

I step out of hotel tubs cleaner, calmer, and better prepared for where the day or night takes me. Thinking of ancient Romans rewrapping their togas post-caldarium and Edo-era Japanese bathers donning kimonos as they emerge from hot springs, I grab the robe embroidered with the hotel logo.

Whether I’ve just escaped the hot weather of a Botswana safari or a New York City snowstorm, the bath has been a trip all its own.