The first time I went to Goa, it was with a friend from college, and it was my first non-work trip in nearly a decade.
Until then, most of my travel within India had happened on assignment as a news reporter. Which meant I travelled the way reporters often do — arriving in unfamiliar towns with little planning, bargaining with auto-rickshaw drivers outside railway stations, and checking into whichever hotel looked reasonably safe and affordable.
There was a ritual to it.
After stepping into a hotel lobby, I would briefly inspect the reception desk, glance into the room, mentally note the lock on the door and the people hanging around the premises, before deciding whether to stay. In small-town India, there was also a phrase women travellers quietly relied on.
“Family hotel.”
It was less a category than a coded request for safety.
Tell the rickshaw driver you wanted a family hotel and he generally understood the assignment: no shady lodges, no hidden staircases, no drunken men loitering in corridors. Just a clean room where a woman travelling alone could sleep without anxiety.
Goa, I assumed, would not require such calculations. Panaji was a tourist hub after all, full of hotels catering to every budget imaginable. Besides, this time I was not even travelling alone.
Imagine then, my bewilderment when my friend and I spent the better part of an afternoon dragging our luggage from hotel to hotel while she rejected every single one.
The rooms looked perfectly acceptable to me. The buildings seemed secure enough. Some even had balconies.
At the third hotel, exasperated and sweaty, I finally asked what exactly she was looking for.
She hesitated before saying, with complete seriousness: “I won’t stay anywhere that doesn’t have white sheets.”
White bed linen.
White towels.
White bathrobes.
That was the benchmark.
I remember staring at her, trying to understand what white fabric had to do with travel, comfort, or safety. But over time, I realised she was merely articulating a global language of hospitality that many travellers instinctively recognise.
White means luxury.
Or at least the performance of luxury.
Five-star hotels have perfected this aesthetic over decades. Crisp white sheets signal cleanliness. White towels imply sophistication. White robes whisper indulgence. The entire visual grammar of luxury hospitality rests on an almost clinical neutrality — beige walls, soft yellow lighting, silent carpets, minimalist furniture, and linen so aggressively white that it seems designed never to encounter actual life.
Over the years, I would become intimately familiar with this world.
As a freelance writer, I occasionally worked on assignments for travel magazines where the arrangement was understood, if never openly stated. Hotels offered complimentary stays. Magazines received advertising revenue. Writers produced elegant stories that subtly persuaded readers that happiness could be found inside infinity pools and breakfast buffets.
For a writer like me, this was always difficult.
Partly because I do not enjoy being told what to think. But also because, after a point, there was very little left to describe.
Every luxury hotel began to resemble every other luxury hotel.
The lobby music changed. The city outside changed. But inside, the experience remained strangely interchangeable. A five-star hotel in Jaipur often felt emotionally identical to one in Kochi, Bengaluru, or Dubai. Their greatest aspiration seemed to be the elimination of surprise.
The industry celebrates this sameness through one of its favourite words: “home.”
Hospitality brochures constantly promise that guests will “feel at home”. The phrase appears everywhere — on websites, advertisements, even handwritten welcome notes placed beside imported fruit bowls.
But travel, at least to me, has never been about feeling at home.
Travel is valuable precisely because it unsettles you.
It forces you into unfamiliar conversations, unfamiliar food habits, unfamiliar sounds at night. It teaches you how different people live and what they consider normal. A memorable stay is rarely the one with the fluffiest towels. It is the one where something unexpected happens — a conversation with a tea seller, a monsoon power cut, a balcony overlooking a noisy fish market, or an eccentric guesthouse owner who insists on feeding you mango pickle made by his mother.
Some of the most unforgettable places I have stayed in did not have white sheets.
They had mismatched curtains. Buckets instead of bathtubs. Unreliable Wi-Fi. Occasionally, lizards.
What they also had was personality.
A sense that one was somewhere specific, somewhere alive.
Luxury hospitality often mistakes predictability for comfort. But there is a thin line between comfort and sterility. In trying so hard to erase inconvenience, many hotels also erase character.
The irony is that the most meaningful travel experiences are often born from small discomforts — getting lost, negotiating language barriers, adjusting to local rhythms, learning patience.
White sheets may reassure travellers that they are in safe, sanitised hands.
But the soul of travel lies elsewhere.
Not in the rooms designed to resemble every other room in the world, but in the rare places that could exist nowhere else.
