In the nineteenth century, the British travelogue on America was becoming an increasingly popular subgenre of travel writing. This chapter explores how American hotel culture was perceived, discussed, and variously imagined at the other side of the Atlantic. The narrative functions of temporary American accommodations in Victorian popular culture reveal tensions in transatlantic connections and changing attitudes to the renegade or lost colony. For British writers, American accommodations continued to hold a peculiar fascination, both the extended "spell of boarding" and how this trend was accommodated by the newly thriving hotel culture: by enormous buildings like ugly hospitals that signal in their architecture how hospitality and domesticity are subsumed by the need to accommodate "half the town". The chapter describes Charlotte Yonge's evocation of unsettled boardinghouse settlers to illustrate what extended stays in America came to represent in mid-Victorian domestic fiction.