SERVICED APARTMENTS


An artist’s impression of the proposed interior of Moxy Slough


accommodation increase in


far this year, with Edinburgh at


36% 8.7%


Manchester so


for London SOURCE: STR


6% and buyingbusinesstravel.com


In this special 100th issue of Buying Business Travel, it’s only natural to look back and take stock of where the sector was around the time of the first issue – and Banks’ comments reflect how far the serviced apartments sector has evolved. In 2003, most serviced apartment


bookings came in by phone or fax. There were operators and agents, but hybrids barely existed. And serviced apartments needed a lot of explaining to corporates. “Sixteen years ago, I left IHG to work for BridgeStreet,” recalls Jo Layton, director of CAP Worldwide. “Businesses were not seeing agents; it was like breaking new ground every day when we decided to knock on the doors of corporates.” Layton drove the adoption of the quality assessment programme through Quality in Tourism, alongside David Smith and Lorna Keane. “I could not believe we were putting people into apartments that had not been assessed,” she says. In 2003, the TAS Guide (now GSAIR)


opened with an explanation of what serviced apartments did, something it continues to this day. “We sponsored food critic Egon Ronay from 1990 to 1994 to give apartments


in the UK percentage points because the Egon Ronay name was a brand the corporate market could count on. In 1995, we launched Roomspace, providing the only serviced apartments in central London, other than a block here and there,” remembers Charles McCrow, chief executive of The Apartment Service (TAS). The word “apartment” was not in common usage. “Before that, they were all flats,” he says. However, serviced apartments were not entirely alien to corporate life, and the likes of Oracle and Microsoft could see the benefits in an extended-stay model: “They had fairly senior personnel spending chunks of time in the UK,” says John Fisher, chairman of House of Fisher, whose accommodation they used. And, of course, there was the odd finance firm. David Smith, director of City Apartments, recalls: “In 1999 our first client was probably Merrill Lynch, staying in a little rooftop studio above Smithfield market – it was noisy at 4am on a Monday morning, even though we triple glazed it. We could not get away with that now.”


Since then quality has improved, and Smith believes the not-for-profit trade body 2019 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 131


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