IN TRANSIT: AMSTERDAM -- While most frequenters of luxury hotels are obsessed with service, I've always been willing to overlook a few hiccups in return for top flight amenities, design, or location. (What can I say? I'm a child of the Schrager generation.) But even I was touched by the staff at the College Hotel in Amsterdam, a two-year-old boutique near the Museumplein, practically around the corner from the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh. The name has a double meaning -- not only is the building itself a former school, but the hotel essentially doubles as the Top Gun of hospitality for Dutch students. Every time I turned around, there were eager young twentysomethings either leaping to help or else turning to their mentors for help when an impatient and frightened guest insists his reservation is actually for two nights instead of one.

The rooms themselves were decorated in a style of studied loucheness I now think of as "Tom Ford Chic" -- dark woods, velvet, and a shampoo that seemed to consist solely of musk. My room on the third floor was formerly the school's attic, accountingly for the sloping ceilings and weather beams protruding from the floor. (In a nice touch, the requisite flatscreeen television was pinned to one such beam).

But what makes the College Hotel so charming (and leads me to recommend it over the Lloyd and the NH Grand Krasnapolsky, where I had stayed during a previous trip) was the bright-and-eager eyes of the students, who are in some ways wise beyond their years (one bartender made me the perfect Negroni) and in some ways still learning (I had to teach another bartender the proper recipe for a mint julep, which turned out quite nicely).

Read more of Greg Lindsay's travel blog, IN TRANSIT.