Trendsurfing: Pod hotels (The Times)
By David Rowan
You cannot see your hotel room while you're sleeping. So does it really matter if it is half the size of a conventional bedroom? Size is suddenly no longer everything in the battle to entice the budget traveller. Inspired by the compact simplicity of Japanese "capsule hotels", a new wave of tiny, functional bedrooms is about to hit the hospitality market. Some of these "pod hotels" trade on chic design touches, others on bottom-of-the-range prices. Whatever your tastes, they offer another option for those seeking clean, unfussy accommodation pitched somewhere between traditional urban hotels and gruesome city-centre hostels.
Next month, the people behind the YO! Sushi restaurants plan to announce their first three London "Yotels", where £75 will buy a tight space packed with design statements. You won't get a view - windows look inwardly on to corridors - but rooms do have stylish rotating beds, flat-screen TVs, and "aircraft-cabin mood lighting". That's because the company chairman, Simon Woodroffe, was inspired not just by Tokyo capsule hotels, but also by British Airways' first-class recliners. So he hired Priestman Goode, designers for the Airbus A380 and Virgin Atlantic.
"Affordable luxury is the key, but usually the numbers don't add up," explains Gerard Greene, Yotel's chief executive. "So we've shrunk the size of the room to around 10 square metres." This compares to 18 to 25 sq m in a typical boutique hotel. "Plenty of facets of the room will remind you of a four-star hotel," he says, "yet with a very contemporary design - not trendy, but very mellow, meant to be calming."
Greene, formerly a hotel analyst, has waited 12 years to fill the gap between budget hotels and high-end design temples such as Ian Schrager's. So who are his customers? "I don't know," he confesses. "It will be a huge cross-section. When the first budget Travelodges opened, people expected them to attract second-hand car salesmen and builders, but it's proved much wider than that. I'm sure we'll get the architect down from Birmingham who earns £100,000, but we've also had inquiries from families, who can take a second room for the children and have some privacy."
It is becoming a global trend. Yotel is talking to prospective franchisees on the Continent; on New York's East Side, meanwhile, a renovation of the historic Pickwick Arms Hotel is similarly packing tiny rooms with high-tech accessories, such as iPod docking stations, then charging accordingly compact prices. For those on a particularly tight budget, there is now even an option to pay for sleep by the hour: a company called MetroNaps has installed "sleeping pods" in the Empire State Building and at Vancouver airport. You lie back in the sleek black-and-grey pods, snoozing in semi-privacy while wearing sound-blocking earphones.
But London is where the action is. Stelios Haji-Ioannou has just opened his first easyHotel, a 34-room pod hotel near Hyde Park that had just 18 rooms before it was converted. A basic bed, shower and toilet will start at £10 a night, plus the cost of disposable linen. "I believe Stelios has copied us, but his is a lowest-common-denominator deal," Gerard Greene says rather disapprovingly. "I'm not really into that. I'm very much into design."
(The Times Magazine, August 6 2005)
. . . AND READ MORE TRENDSURFING COLUMNS HERE . . .
You cannot see your hotel room while you're sleeping. So does it really matter if it is half the size of a conventional bedroom? Size is suddenly no longer everything in the battle to entice the budget traveller. Inspired by the compact simplicity of Japanese "capsule hotels", a new wave of tiny, functional bedrooms is about to hit the hospitality market. Some of these "pod hotels" trade on chic design touches, others on bottom-of-the-range prices. Whatever your tastes, they offer another option for those seeking clean, unfussy accommodation pitched somewhere between traditional urban hotels and gruesome city-centre hostels.
Next month, the people behind the YO! Sushi restaurants plan to announce their first three London "Yotels", where £75 will buy a tight space packed with design statements. You won't get a view - windows look inwardly on to corridors - but rooms do have stylish rotating beds, flat-screen TVs, and "aircraft-cabin mood lighting". That's because the company chairman, Simon Woodroffe, was inspired not just by Tokyo capsule hotels, but also by British Airways' first-class recliners. So he hired Priestman Goode, designers for the Airbus A380 and Virgin Atlantic.
"Affordable luxury is the key, but usually the numbers don't add up," explains Gerard Greene, Yotel's chief executive. "So we've shrunk the size of the room to around 10 square metres." This compares to 18 to 25 sq m in a typical boutique hotel. "Plenty of facets of the room will remind you of a four-star hotel," he says, "yet with a very contemporary design - not trendy, but very mellow, meant to be calming."
Greene, formerly a hotel analyst, has waited 12 years to fill the gap between budget hotels and high-end design temples such as Ian Schrager's. So who are his customers? "I don't know," he confesses. "It will be a huge cross-section. When the first budget Travelodges opened, people expected them to attract second-hand car salesmen and builders, but it's proved much wider than that. I'm sure we'll get the architect down from Birmingham who earns £100,000, but we've also had inquiries from families, who can take a second room for the children and have some privacy."
It is becoming a global trend. Yotel is talking to prospective franchisees on the Continent; on New York's East Side, meanwhile, a renovation of the historic Pickwick Arms Hotel is similarly packing tiny rooms with high-tech accessories, such as iPod docking stations, then charging accordingly compact prices. For those on a particularly tight budget, there is now even an option to pay for sleep by the hour: a company called MetroNaps has installed "sleeping pods" in the Empire State Building and at Vancouver airport. You lie back in the sleek black-and-grey pods, snoozing in semi-privacy while wearing sound-blocking earphones.
But London is where the action is. Stelios Haji-Ioannou has just opened his first easyHotel, a 34-room pod hotel near Hyde Park that had just 18 rooms before it was converted. A basic bed, shower and toilet will start at £10 a night, plus the cost of disposable linen. "I believe Stelios has copied us, but his is a lowest-common-denominator deal," Gerard Greene says rather disapprovingly. "I'm not really into that. I'm very much into design."
(The Times Magazine, August 6 2005)
. . . AND READ MORE TRENDSURFING COLUMNS HERE . . .
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