HELPED BY NEW BOOKING TECHNOLOGY, HOTELS ARE ADAPTING TO CHANGING TRAVEL TRENDS BY SELLING ROOM STAYS DURING THE DAY
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BOOK A STANDARD ROOM AT THE FOUR-STAR THISTLE HYDE PARK in central London – convenient for West End conferences and other functions – and the rack rate would be about £240 a night, irrespective of how many hours you really want stay in the hotel. But use the room for just three hours during the day at a time of your choosing for, say, a meeting, job interview, or just to freshen up, and the cost is around £85. The Thistle Hyde Park is one of a small
– but growing – number of UK hotels that have signed up to
Byhours.com. This hotel booking website started in Spain in 2012 and last April launched into the UK market with a portfolio of about 25 hotels or so in London, with more subsequently added to include airports and regional cities. Rooms during the day are avail- able in three-, six- and 12-hour periods and, crucially, guests get to choose their check-in time. Byhours is by no means the first to
recognise a demand by travellers – par- ticularly those travelling on business – to find somewhere to sleep, work or hold meetings during the day while away from home or office. But it is the latest iteration of a trend first started by Simon Woodroffe, founder of the Yo! Sushi chain, who created the innovative Yotel concept nearly a decade ago. The first small, pod-like cabins opened within Gatwick airport in 2007, soon fol- lowed by similar airport accommodation at Heathrow and Amsterdam Schiphol and, in 2011, by a city-centre Yotel in midtown Manhattan. Woodroffe’s vision – which may have
owed something to Japan’s so-called capsule hotels that traditionally provided Japanese businessmen with small
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sleeping spaces in the city overnight – was to provide somewhere within airports for travellers wanting basically just a bed and bathroom before or after their flight. But Woodroffe’s innovation was a flexible pricing model: cabins are priced according to time of day and length of stay (typically four hours). Although Yotel’s expansion has proved slower than expected, seven new properties are planned over the next three years, in- cluding in Paris CDG (2016) and Singapore Changi (2018) airports.
ROOMS ‘BY THE HOUR’ Hotels near airports, of course, have usually been open to offering special day-rates because of the transient nature of most of their guests, although many do not advertise this option. Partly, some suggest, this is due to a deep-seated prurience many hoteliers still hold about the concept of selling rooms ‘by the hour’, typically used for ‘romantic’ liaisons – the ‘no-tell motel’ of legend. But times have changed for hoteliers.
Where previously, for example, those travelling short-haul on business might have always stayed in a hotel overnight, the reality of modern corporate travel means that taking an early flight out and a late one back has become the new norm. Many hotels have consequently recognised the need to manage their room assets more flexibly to meet the impact of changing travel habits and boost revenues. And, fortunately for them, so did a new
generation of entrepreneurs, who spotted a market opportunity to harness online technology to match up travellers with short-time slots during daytime hours, when most hotel space was under-utilised. The era of ‘microstays’ was born.
One of those recognising the opportu-
nity was David Lebée who, while working in a Paris hotel in his late 20s, wondered why hotels did not take more advantage of their empty rooms during the day. So, together with his friend Thibaud D’Agrèves, he set up
Dayuse.com in 2010, a French website that enabled rooms to be booked during the day in time slots of from three to eight hours. Dayuse quickly expanded its reach
outside France to include Belgium and Switzerland, with the UK added in 2012, now with some 108 hotels in its system in London alone, and 72 in the rest of the UK. Most are in the high-end (four-star plus) category, including such chains as Marriott, Novotel and Holiday Inn. Bookings in the UK are now running at a rate of 2,500 a month and Dayuse says about a half of all bookings are for business meetings, with another 20 per cent used by travellers in transit at airports, while the rest is leisure. Day-rates vary according to hotel, and
are at a discount to the full overnight rates – typically between 30 and 70 per cent of the rack rate. The Hilton London Paddington – convenient for those arriving on the Heathrow Express and seeking a room to sleep or freshen-up in – at the time of writing had a rate of £119 on a mid-week day (from 9am to 5.30pm), compared with a full overnight rack rate of £364.
MOBILE AND FLEXIBLE While Europe has generally been ahead of the curve on the microstays trend – Brussels-based
Between9and5.com is another player, which works mostly with established brands rather than indi- vidual hotels – US hoteliers have generally
BBT JULY/AUGUST 2015 25
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