My Review of "Instant Hotel: Season 1"

Traveling is of course one of the top things that everyone wants to do in the world these days. There are a lot of us that dream of traveling in luxury where we'll feel like a million dollars. Unfortunately, not all of us can live in a lap of luxury and so we have to settle for nice places that we can rent.

The premise of Instant Hotel is to show the viewers how great Australia can be. They picked out 10 instant hotels in Australia, which are basically Airbnb rentals. Each of the owners of the instant hotels are to live in the other instant hotels and evaluate how they liked their stay. This is TV so there's always twists.

If you're the owner of the instant hotel you can't evaluate your own hotel of course but you will get a group of 8 people living in your instant hotel for one night. Their judging criteria is based on how they liked the house, the location of the hotel, how they enjoyed their night sleep there and the value for the price of the hotel.

I thought this would be a fun little show. It was actually fun for the first few episodes. I liked some of the earlier contestants like Mark, Jannine, Adam and Kathy. They had level headed contestants that seemed like they were going to be voting things fairly. Then I of course realized I was watching a reality TV show.

Things quickly became dramatic because all of these instant hotel owners have put their blood sweat and tears into their properties and some other contestant just comes up and rips them apart with dagger cutting criticism. Some of the criticism is warranted but sometimes it's just cat-fighting among the contestants. That's when the show started getting ugly.

The first half of the season was tolerable in terms of drama but the second season was almost unbearable. It almost seemed as though they picked certain contestants not because of the beauty of their instant hotels but because the contestant would try to hog television attention.

I get it. It's a TV show and you have to get ratings but watching the civilized contestants was entertaining for me. To put spoiled brats on the TV show isn't only damaging to your show but it's also very damaging to Australia's tourism business. I would have loved to go check out some of the instant hotels in this show but watching some of the owners bicker and fight throughout the show put a bad taste in my mouth.

I don't see how Australia would allow this show to continue when it shows how horrible some of the owners of these instant hotels are. Maybe there's a conspiracy from established hotels to get this TV show out so that people start going to regular hotels instead of instant hotels. I don't know.

It could also be because like I said before, the contestants put a ton of effort into their instant hotels. They do build an ego because of their work. I could see some of that in the first half of the season and it was understandable. The second half with the "playing the game" mentality was pretty draining for me. If they're already losing in points and have no way of winning the competition then why are you sabotaging other players? They should have also told these contestants that they're representing Australia. If you see that another hotel is better than yours you should concede because you want the world to see the best that Australia has to offer.

Overall, I still enjoyed this first season and I just hope that the second half of the first season was a one off. If it continues to be that dramatic I'll have to stop watching and I'll probably lose my interest in renting an instant hotel in Australia. I'll give this season a 7 out of 10. There are still a lot to love in this season. It's still interesting to see what's available in the different parts of Australia but beware the second half of the season. It's a bit of a doozy.