With the COVID crisis, hotels have seen their customers become extremely scarce and there is no reason to believe that the situation will improve in the near future. Faced with this situation, the major hotel groups have had to find a way to fill their hotels without relying on business or leisure travelers.
After Work from Home comes Work from Hotel
If remote work was quickly seen as a way to stop the spread of the virus, we know that not everyone is in the same boat when it comes to using it. Depending on whether you have room to set up an office, whether you are alone, a couple or with children, whether you know how to balance your professional and private life, the experience can be more or less pleasant.
Hence the idea of the large hotel groups to offer to rent rooms by the day to come and work there before going home in the evening.
Unfortunately when you click on “work”, you remember that you are at Accor.
You’ll think we’re hard on Accor, but the most relevant adjective we can find to talk about it is “almost”.
Anyway, let’s check out Hilton.
WorkSpaces by Hilton allows you to take a room for the day and benefit from a range of services such as food, lounge access, wifi, free bottles of water…
And on top of that, to “push” its new product,Hilton is offering bonus points on its Hilton Honors loyalty program.
Naturally, Marriott could not stay without a responses and launched its Day Pass offer.
Again, no surprises: you can enjoy a room from 6am to 6pm, you have wifi, water and access to equipment like printers and fax machines.
In order not to forget anyone, let’s go to Hyatt which offers “Work From Hyatt”.
Here the concept is a little different because we are talking about stays of 7 days minimum including a daily food credit and highlighting many services like beach cabins etc. What Hyatt is trying to do is not, like its competitors, to have its rooms occupied on a daily basis by a local clientele in need of appropriate work space but to offer low-cost packages to work from a dream destination since we can no longer go to work at the office.
Notice the wink in their ad that also talks about…school. Well yes, so that parents can go to work in a Hyatt on the edge of a dream beach, it is still necessary to get the message across that children can also attend school remotely.
Keeping rooms occupied at any cost
We have targeted here the offers intended for “workers” but in general all the chains try to repackage their product to target in a more precise way the new behaviors and needs born from the health crisis: work from the hotel during the day but also “Staycation” to attract a clientele that can no longer travel but wants to break the routine by organizing a weekend near their home for example. You can stay in your city and want to get out of your routine and have a treat at the hotel.
Work from Hotel : just a marketing trick
As interesting as these movements are to save what can be saved, they are nothing new: the “day use” room has always existed in many hotels, especially those welcoming business customers. Whether it is to work during the day, to sleep between two planes during a long connection or, (very lucrative business for the small hotels of the peripheral activity zones) to welcome the sales representative in need of extra marital activity ….it has always existed. The offer has just been repackaged and remarketed to fit in with the times but there’s not really much new under the sun.
Image : work from a hotel by Chinnapong via Shutterstock
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