A central room is buying transport, not location

Choosing accommodation on nightly rate alone treats location as a preference. It is closer to a purchase of transport, and the two costs move in opposite directions.

The rate difference is a transport budget

A cheaper room further out saves a sum per night. That sum has to cover the return journeys made from it, for every person travelling, on every day of the stay.

Two people making two return trips a day is four fares, which erases a modest saving quickly in cities with distance-based or zonal fares.

Where the saving survives that arithmetic, the outer location is genuinely cheaper. Where it does not, the central room was the less expensive option all along.

Time is the larger cost for a short trip

A daily commute of forty minutes each way removes more than an hour from a day. On a three-night trip that is a meaningful share of the time available.

On a longer stay the calculation reverses, because the accumulated saving grows while the daily time cost stays constant and the traveller adapts to the routine.

The middle of the trip is also when a return to the room during the day becomes valuable, and that is only practical when the room is close enough to reach without planning.

Central is not one thing

City centres contain business districts that empty in the evening, entertainment areas that fill at night, and residential quarters that do neither.

A room in a business district can be cheap at weekends and poorly served for food, while one in a nightlife area is the reverse in both respects.

Reading which of these a location is, rather than how close it is to a map's centre, predicts the experience better than the distance figure does.

Transport connections matter more than distance

A property two stops from a station on a frequent line is functionally closer than one that is nearer in kilometres but requires a walk and a bus with a long headway.

Late services are the constraint that catches people, since a network that runs every few minutes during the day may stop entirely well before a restaurant closes.

A single late taxi fare can consume several nights of saving, which makes the last departure time on the relevant line a more useful figure than the distance to the centre.

Where the premium is worth paying

Short trips, early departures and travel with luggage or children all favour proximity, because each additional transfer carries a cost that is not measured in fares.

Trips built around a single venue or district favour proximity to that, rather than to a city centre that may not be where any of the days are actually spent.