Doesn't it depend on what you'd be making if you did do it manually?

Cheap hotels in Bangkok
Cheap hotels in Birmingham
Cheap hotels in Buenos Aires

I'm reminded nebulously of a discussion one or two years back about variation for variation's sake. If they really are all the same, there's no point in coming across like a freshman who has just discovered the thesaurus.

99 uses for a dead hamster
87 uses for a dead wombat
42 uses for a dead cricket

If, on the other hand, each one is potentially different, then stick with the handmade versions.

You should make sure that your most important pages have titles and meta descriptions that are hand crafted.

Less important pages may have automatic generated title if (because of the number of pages) it is not practical to set each manually. Ideally, you would need to have something like: if title/meta desc field in CMS is non-blank, use it, otherwise create programmatically.

I would also review then whether these less important pages that use programmatically generated titles should perhaps be noindexed (e.g. if you are using a template and the location is only thing that is different between pages).

I use them on my event taxonomy pages, and haven't had a problem. Specific events have individual unique titles and meta descriptions, so it comes down to plus or minus 40% auto generated and 60% hand written. No-indexing the taxonomy pages isn't an option; many of them rank extremely well for their locations and are as popular as the individual event pages.

I generally prefer manually optimization for these, but what you described shoudl not be bad.