Type "LGBTQ+ friendly" into a hotel search and you'll get a tick box. Tick it, and the results change — but nothing about the hotels actually does. It's a label a property opts into, or one a booking site invents, and it tells you almost nothing about how you'll be treated when you walk through the door.
That's not a dig at the hotels. It's a problem with the label. Friendliness isn't a badge. It's in the details.
What a tick box can't tell you
Here is what a filter has never been able to answer.
It can't tell you whether the booking system will accept two names without forcing one of them into a field marked "Mr & Mrs". It can't tell you whether the person on the front desk will hand over a key to a couple, or ask — brightly, meaning well — whether you'd prefer twin beds. It can't tell you whether your confirmation arrives addressed properly, or whether you'll spend your first ten minutes at check-in explaining your own relationship to someone who is only trying to be helpful.
None of that is visible in a search result. All of it is what a holiday actually feels like.
What it looks like when it's done properly
A hotel that has genuinely thought about this doesn't announce anything. It just does the small things right:
- Your names are recorded exactly as they should appear — not "and guest"
- Nobody asks who is sleeping where. One bed or two is a preference, not a confession
- The pronouns in the emails are yours
- Nobody asks whether you're travelling with "a friend"
- The anniversary is old news to the staff by the time you arrive
That's the whole list. And notice how little of it is about being welcomed. Nearly all of it is about not having to explain yourself.
The word itself is the problem
"Friendly" is a low bar. Nobody advertises a hotel as "friendly to people with brown hair", because welcoming a guest with brown hair is simply the job. Put a qualifier in front of a word and you've quietly accepted that the baseline might not apply.
I understand why it exists. Plenty of people have had a holiday where something small went wrong — a form that wouldn't take their details, a receptionist who assumed, a question they shouldn't have been asked. The label is a genuine attempt to solve that. It just solves it in the wrong place, by promising the floor instead of building it.
The version I'd rather work towards doesn't need a word at all. You book the trip you want, you turn up, and it's already handled.
Privacy is a habit, not a policy
The part I feel strongest about: nothing about you should be volunteered to anyone, ever.
When I book, a hotel needs names, dates and payment details. It does not need to know how you and your partner are related to each other, and I don't offer it. No assumptions, no outing — not to the supplier, not on a form, and not buried in a "special requests" box that four different people will read before you arrive.
If something genuinely requires that information, I'll tell you, explain why, and we'll decide together how you'd like it handled. What I won't do is answer a question just because the form asked it.
What I do instead
I don't check whether a hotel ticks a box. I look at how it behaves — the way it writes, how it answers a straight question, whether its paperwork bends to fit people or expects people to bend to fit the paperwork. I've been doing this long enough to have opinions, and a list.
Then I do the boring parts properly:
- Your names go in exactly as you want them
- I ask about beds as a preference, not as a question with a right answer
- I deal with the awkward forms so you never see them
- Everything sits in one inbox, with one person who owns it from first chat to final taxi
And then it doesn't come up again. You arrive, it's already sorted, and you get on with your holiday.
Just travellers
The reason I don't use "LGBTQ+ friendly" as a filter isn't that it's offensive. It's that it's a downgrade. It takes something that ought to be a baseline — being treated like a person — and turns it into a feature, something a property can opt into and quietly opt out of later.
Nobody should have to check whether they'll be welcome. You should be able to book a week in the sun the way anyone else does: with a good agent, a straightforward conversation, and no need to explain who's coming.
So I don't have a badge, and I'm not on a list. I'd rather be judged on whether the trip was right — which is the only test that really matters.
Friendliness isn't a badge. It's a habit. And you can't tick a box for it.