Why a Hotel That Makes You Write a Letter Might Be the Cure for Algorithm-Driven Travel
Can slow booking restore the magic of travel? Image from Unsplash+.
I was asked to comment on El Elevador for a piece in London’s Metro. This solitary retreat, perched on a volcanic cliff in the Canary Islands, takes bookings only via handwritten letter. No website form, no instant confirmation, no algorithm guessing what you might like. You write to the resort explaining why you want to stay, and if they choose you, they write back, then send a private link so you can pick your dates.
As usual, only a few lines made it into the final piece, so here's the fuller version of what I told them, on what a hotel like this reveals about our relationship with technology, choice, and travel.
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You can read the original Metro piece here (link to Metro article).
Key Takeaways
Booking a holiday online has become fast, convenient, and strangely hollow. Endless scrolling can leave us bored and disconnected rather than excited.
El Elevador's' requirement to write a letter by hand forces reflection that doesn’t come with algorithm-fed browsing.
Exclusivity and uncertainty (will they choose you?) make the wait feel meaningful.
Social-media-driven travel planning hands your itinerary to an algorithm's prediction of what you'll like, which reduces your autonomy.
The instinct behind El Elevador — slow down, write, reflect — shouldn't be reserved for people who can afford a high-end ‘digital detox.’
El Elevador: Why a Letter-Only Booking System Compels Guests
It's simple for anyone with an Internet connection to research, self-plan, and self-book travel. We've come to expect easy, convenient, quick transactions that rarely involve human-to-human communication. An endless menu of holiday options scrolls past on the big booking sites. A chatbot might pop up to offer assistance, and algorithms operate in the background to feed you what you're looking for, but ultimately organising your break has become an increasingly impersonal, isolating process, like much else in our self-service, algorithmically-driven environment.
The problem is, at-our-fingertips convenience and ease don’t give us all that we crave. If you've scrolled through an endless list of beautiful photographs of hotels and beaches, all the while feeling a bit meh, you've understood the boredom, disconnection, and flatness that an everything-on-tap, impersonal process of holiday-booking can induce.
It can also be really hard to commit. You see a great-looking post on Instagram or a reel on Tiktok about a holiday destination, but then so many other options present themselves that you end up not feeling attached to any one destination. It's the holiday equivalent of the problem many experience with high-choice, low-commitment online dating, which (let's face it) can feel pretty hollow after a while.
El Elevador's brand and marketing strategy stands in stark opposition to the modern holiday-booking experience.
The usual process is quick and convenient. El Elevador, by contrast, is slow, requiring thoughtfulness, patience, and the constructive disruption of our the automatic, non-reflective, fast-paced behaviours we've fallen into with digital technologies.
To stay at El Elevador, you have to stop, think, and reflect upon why you want to visit. Then you have to do something increasingly unfamiliar to many of us: sit down with pen and paper, formulate your plea, handwrite it, address an envelope, find a stamp. Afterwards, you must wait to see whether your bid is successful.
Unlike the online booking process, all this is odd, special, unfamiliar, and personal. It pulls a greater connection with our humanity from us, and it connects us with the human on the other side.
In order to incentivise people to slow down, think, be patient, sit with uncertainty - all of which many of us have become rather allergic to in this impatient age - El Elevador needs to present itself as special, with an air of mystery, remoteness, exclusivity. Will they accept you? Will you meet their criteria, whatever they are? Do you pass muster? Acceptance feels special, like you've gained access to an elite club. El Elevador needs this exclusivity, remoteness, and elite vibe to motivate their would-be guests to apply. The expectation for something truly special will likely be high.
Does Technology Play Too Big a Role in How We Travel Now?
Because so much of modern travel runs through algorithms, a lot of its magic gets lost. We see something on social media, chosen for us by an algorithm, and we want something just like it. Hotels and restaurants around the world are starting to look alike wherever you go, designed for Instagram, shaped by what social-media-primed guests expect to see. Travel shouldn't work like an Amazon order, arriving exactly as promised.
Much of what makes travel worthwhile is the unexpected: the unpredictable, the uncontrollable, the serendipitous, the unplanned encounter with local people and cultures, a landscape that looks nothing like home, the things you learn along the way.
People are entitled to decide what they want from a break, but a travel and hospitality industry built around algorithms tends to serve consumers rather than travellers seeking a deeper connection to the places, people, and cultures they visit. An itinerary planned through TikTok is one big tech has already predicted you'll like — a trip chosen for you rather than by you. That's a loss of your autonomy.
What a Resort Like This Offers People Rethinking Their Relationship With Technology
When we're required to slow down and put a pen to paper describing what we want from a holiday, we're returned to ourselves. We have to consider what we actually want and need. That act is already a small rebellion against being steered by algorithmic predictions of our preferences. Writing that letter is an act of autonomy, attention, and awareness, in a world working hard to take all three from us. El Elevador extends that principle through the stay: the only digital element in the entire process, as far as I can tell, is the link sent to book and pay once your letter has been accepted.
El Elevador doesn't appear to use the phrase ‘digital detox’ anywhere on its site. When I see that phrase elsewhere, the holiday being sold is usually expensive.
But everyone benefits from feeling more connected to themselves and others, and from shifting attention away from screens and toward the people and world around them. The well-off guests El Elevador is likely aiming for aren’t the only ones who get something from such an experience.
My challenge to the hospitality and travel industry is this:
How do we make that slowing-down, that reconnection with self and others, less of an elite experience and more of an accessible one?
How do we build more humanity and meaning into travel for more people, not just those who can pay for it?