Why a boutique hotel in Sydney made me rethink my addiction to long-haul travel.

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The Staycation Convert

7 June, 2026

Words by:

Sarah Palmieri

For years, I believed the best stories required a passport stamp and a substantial amount of inconvenience. A stay at Spicers Potts Point proved that sometimes a change of perspective is more valuable than a change of country.

The staycation has always struck me as a slightly suspicious concept. A holiday without the holiday. A vacation that asks you to stay within arm’s reach of your regular life and somehow return refreshed.

For years, I wasn’t buying it.

I have spent most of my adult life convinced that the further I travelled, the better the story. There is a particular thrill in exchanging your familiar world for someone else’s: new currencies, unfamiliar train systems, the panic of realising you’ve ordered dinner in a language you barely speak. A little bit of difficulty can feel romantic, right? And that makes at least my holiday guilt feel earned.

And yet, over the past year, I have found myself increasingly nourished by the staycation, a development that concerns me slightly. Once you’ve spent enough time dragging suitcases through airports and pretending four hours of sleep is part of the adventure, the appeal of a holiday that requires very little logistical suffering becomes difficult to ignore.

During Australian Fashion Week, I checked into Spicers Potts Point and reluctantly began reconsidering my position.

I’m from Melbourne. I live in a one-bedroom apartment in the inner north where every departure begins with carrying a suitcase down two flights of stairs while trying not to knock over a pot plant. Spicers, by contrast, occupies two grand Victorian terraces tucked among the leafy streets of Potts Point. The sandstone façade and wrought-iron balconies make it look less like a hotel and more like the sort of Sydney address you assume belongs to someone with a trust fund and a very good wine collection.

The moment I arrived, someone appeared to take my luggage. A small luxury, perhaps, but one that immediately shifts your understanding of how the next 24 hours might unfold. After a breezy flight from Melbourne, I was greeted by name and shown through a sprawling terrace suite overlooking a canopy of London plane trees. There was a freestanding bathtub, a rainfall shower and a writing desk positioned beside the window, as if somebody had anticipated exactly how I would spend an afternoon avoiding emails.

 

What Spicers does particularly well is make you forget you’re staying in a hotel at all. There is no cavernous lobby filled with people dragging roller bags across marble floors. Instead, there are quiet sitting rooms, bookshelves, fireplaces and cookies that sit on the kitchen bench. You move through the property much like you would a particularly beautiful home, albeit one maintained by people far more competent than yourself.

Fashion Week meant my days were largely spent elsewhere. Runways, meetings, coffees and hurried lunches filled most of my schedule. But the mark of a great hotel isn’t that it keeps you inside it. It’s that you spend the day looking forward to getting back. Every afternoon, walking back up the hill towards Potts Point, I felt an almost embarrassing sense of relief knowing Spicers was waiting at the end of it. The room would be immaculate. The bed would resemble a cloud engineered by a luxury bedding conglomerate. Someone downstairs would inevitably ask how my day had been and seem sincerely interested in the answer.

Sydney and Melbourne are not radically different cities. We like to pretend they are, largely for sport. But staying in Potts Point allowed me to experience Sydney less as a visitor ticking off landmarks and more as someone borrowing a different life for a few days. One of Spicers’ greatest strengths is its sense of place. Rather than insulating guests from the neighbourhood, the hotel acts as a gateway into it. Potts Point remains one of Sydney’s most charming pockets: leafy, walkable and glamorous, with Art Deco apartment blocks, old terraces and corner cafés.

And so, my days became a procession of recommendations. Breakfast conversations with the hotel team led me to long lunches, neighbourhood bars and restaurants I might otherwise have missed. Eating my way through the city: pasta at Pellegrino 2000, dinner at Baba’s Place, a margarita at OK Cantina and a martini at Bar Copains.

What struck me most was how little I actually knew. I can navigate New York’s subway without thinking. I can tell you how to get from the Eiffel Tower to the Louvre. Yet when I needed to get from Potts Point to Darlinghurst, I found myself happily accepting directions from the front desk. That is the pleasure of travelling within your own country. You get to be both local and tourist at once.

Every morning I wandered downstairs for breakfast beneath the hotel’s skylight. The same staff greeted me each day. They remembered my coffee order, asked about the previous evening and invariably had another recommendation up their sleeve. By the end of the stay, I had slipped into the comforting illusion that I belonged there.

Perhaps that’s what a successful staycation ultimately provides: not escape, but perspective. The chance to see a familiar place from a different angle. To remember that novelty doesn’t always require a passport. Sometimes it is waiting a one-hour flight away. Sometimes it’s in your own city. Sometimes it’s as simple as sleeping in a bed with a significantly higher thread count than your own and allowing somebody else to worry about the details for a change.

It creates the feeling of having gone somewhere, even when you haven’t gone very far at all. The best ones briefly convince you that this slower, more elegant version of your life might actually be your real life, before checkout arrives and you return to carrying your own suitcase down the stairs.

 

Should you decide to try the staycation for yourself, there are worse places to start. Spicers Potts Point currently offers a City Escape package with 20% off stays, alongside a winter Coolcations package complete with mulled wine for those looking to embrace the season properly.

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