Sure, you can rely on the motel wake-up call if you want to, but I personally prefer a backup. If I oversleep and miss the golden hour because some lobby jockey didn't set the time right, the rest of my day is shot.
The problem is, nearly all travel alarm clocks are either too gimmicky or just plain junk. But I may have found the perfect bedside buzzer in Industrial Facility's Jetlag.
The Jetlag does exactly and only what a travel timepiece should. The display, split in half, shows both the current time and the alarm time, all the time, so there's never any question what it's set to. Plus, each half has its own +/- button, making it almost impossible to screw things up. A switch on the underside allows you to lock the settings, so you can't accidentally change them.
The design is so simple, it's rendered an instruction manual completely unnecessary and has almost entirely eliminated the possibility of setting the alarm incorrectly while exhausted, and possibly drunk, in a foreign environment.
Unfortunately, a price has yet to be announced. Hopefully, it won't be astronomical like most well-designed gadgets. Otherwise, I'm back to trying to find a decent clock for the road.