The beginning doesn’t feel like the best place to start recounting my experience with the Drifter Hotel. Not the moment I exited my Uber and walked through what had to be the front entrance of the new 20-room hotel in New Orleans’ Mid-City neighborhood. Nor the moment I entered the lobby and looked around, noting that yes, this did appear to be a wonderful repurposing of a 1950s roadside motel. Nor the moment a twenty-something oh-so-indolently checked me into my room, her lack of precise unfriendliness leaving me nonetheless unable to say that she was friendly, exactly.
There’s the true beginning, even earlier, when I discovered the Drifter while researching places to stay in New Orleans online before my trip. Design sites and travel Instagrammers love it, heap it with photo essays and designer name-checking, and it likewise seemed to photograph well—it looked like a place I’d like. The seven TripAdvisor reviewers, on the other hand, mustered only a 2.5-star average for the place, complaining of subpar standards of service and the prioritization of throwing a good party over running a hotel. I was scared to stay there even as I knew I had to stay there.
That’s a better place to start, but I still don’t want to start at the beginning, although now I already have, because the stuff that came later better encapsulated the confounding experience of staying at the Drifter Hotel.
Where I should have started: After I got settled into my room, I took a look at the info sheet I’d been given when I checked in. The welcome message read as follows:
Welcome to our beautiful hotel!! The Drifter is a sanctuary and a safe place for all cultures and walks of life. The Drifter Hotel exists as an action & reaction to our culture to harbor the contemporary traveler and the disruptive innovator. We are delighted that you are here…
I’m still parsing how I feel about staying in a place that is an action. I feel surer in my judgment of one with no discernible copy editing mechanism in place, and also in assuring you that there were no disruptive innovators present during my stay. I almost feel that in lieu of a review I could just post this welcome message and be done with it.
Another telling moment: At the start of my Uber ride back from Frenchmen street, where I’d spent an early evening wandering in and out of jazz bars, my driver asked me if I was a local, seeming surprised to potentially be picking one up from Frenchman Street. No, I told him, why? It came out through our conversation that he, a New Orleans native who’s lived there his entire life, didn’t know that the Drifter is a hotel. He thought it was a club.
And: The morning after I checked in, I opened the door to my room in hopes of photographing the pool area while it was still empty. It must have been 7:30 or maybe approaching 8am. On the deep hot pink floor outside my room, a large puddle had formed—It had rained in the night. But there was no drainage from which the puddle might benefit, and it would still be there four hours later when I checked out.
I hopped over the puddle to look out over the pool, and was immediately stopped in this endeavor by the last thing I could have expected, a middle-aged man sitting in the chair next to his door enjoying the morning. We traded “you’re here too?!” smiles, probably while both wondering where our breakfasts would be coming from, since the hotel had already announced that along with having no dinner offerings or staff on call after 10pm, it would lift no finger in this regard, despite its location in an area with no breakfasts spots within a five minute walk. Not even a croissant would be made available, although the reception desk does double as an espresso bar, so at least I could stumble into a caffeine fix. The day before, the bartender had told me about a nearby place called the Bacon Station, but the next morning no such place showed up in Google Maps.
[Review continues below photo gallery]
My neighbor and I represent a central disconnect in the concept of the Drifter, that those who can afford to stay here have long outgrown the kind of deliberate, scantily clad partying that is the property’s true raison d’etre. I couldn’t have paid for a room here when I was 22, but I would have gotten a kick out of drinking my way through a night around the pool.
But alas, I was a guest. For those of us checking in, here’s what to expect: My Standard King room had a fresh, ascetic charm to it. There wasn’t much in terms of furniture—the bed, a built-in sofa, a small desk—but it was done well, and I found it all comfortable. The colorful tile floors made up for the blank walls (not even a TV on them, although there was one small framed picture above the sofa). There were some great touches—a Tivoli radio playing brass brand music on my arrival, huge bath towels, plentiful Aesop toiletries, a comfortable mattress. The vibe got a perhaps unintentional boost from the enormous billboard for a personal injury lawyer looming against the blue sky out my window. Very Better Call Saul. Come night, the a/c successfully drowned out the club music pumping in the pool area—it’s worth noting here that all rooms open directly onto the pool area, so this is an important point.
On the flip side: The wifi sucked, the bed covers were a little flimsy, and one of the bedside lamps, instead of going dead when switched off, turned into a strobe light—I think unintentionally, but I had no choice but to sleep with that light on.
I assume that a problem with dampness inspired the hotel to place a plug-in dehumidifier under the desk in addition to the unit air conditioner. The effort worked, but still I’m left wondering why the issue wasn’t addressed in a more structural way.
From my night at the Drifter I was leaving straight for the airport. Having been denied a late checkout—like I said, making life easy for overnight guests doesn’t rank high here—I went to the park, went to the museum, met a friend of a friend who lives in New Orleans, and then still had an hour to kill, so decided to return to the Drifter for a sendoff drink.
This plan went well at first. I arrived to find a pool party raging outside, but a delightfully empty bar/lobby. I ordered a frozen negroni, which was good but didn’t taste like a negroni. The bartender was a friendly guy, no complaints there. The lobby, when empty-ish like this, is a joy to lounge in. But then suddenly, as can happen in New Orleans, a rainstorm descended, sending all of the partiers rushing my way. One young woman lay down on the sofa across from me and, drink still in hand, promptly fell into a nap.
I decided to kill the rest of that final hour at the airport instead of at the Drifter. There was no place for me to change into a different set of clothes for my flight, the public restrooms having achieved the state you’d expect after accommodating a rager. I waited and changed at the airport.
The Drifter Hotel | 3522 Tulane Avenue, New Orleans | Website | 20 rooms, from $120 on a weekday in low season | The author paid $165 plus tax for a room on a Friday night in May 2018.
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