In the world of hospitality, traditional approaches often operate within rigid, pre-defined time slots (Night stays, for example) where a room was either fully occupied for a night or it wasn’t. In contrast, the modern trend of day-use hotel rooms is a much-needed upgrade on the traditional approach to cater to the dynamic demands of the modern guest.
AT&T started focusing on selling data more than selling minutes in the late 2000s, when asked about the strategy pivot the then head of AT&T, Stan Sigman, allegedly remarked – ‘There is only a minute in a minute’. Similarly, ‘there is only one night in a night’ can be applied to the hospitality industry.
Imagine a scenario where a person checks into your hotel at 9 pm with their flight leaving early in the morning and they check out at 6 am. Given that such use cases are becoming more common, this represents a full half day of wasted revenue and space that could have been cashed in by offering ‘day use hotel rooms’.
Day Use Hotel Rooms: A Modern Concept
What are day-use hotel rooms? Well, as the name suggests, these are hotel rooms that can be used for a smaller part of the day as opposed to the traditional 20-hour check-in, and check-out cycle.
This is not to say that the traditional approach must be scrapped altogether. On the contrary, day-use hotel rooms must be used as an ace up the sleeve of the hoteliers to offer rooms that are empty due to early check-outs, and late check-ins and thereby increase the revenue of a room exponentially.
Advantages of Offering Day-Use Hotel Rooms
For a hotel owner, the biggest benefit of offering day-use hotel rooms is a boost in revenue. As explained before, your room can potentially be occupied multiple times during a single day as opposed to just one occupant who might check out early to catch an early morning flight. A hotelier can tap into this additional revenue without having to change their operations drastically.
Another advantage is that you attract new customer profiles to your property by catering to people who need to make a pit stop in between their travels, work during the day, or celebrate a special occasion with their loved ones during the day. All of these potential guests are the ones who were previously unlikely to consider booking a room at your hotel.
Due to the transient nature of day-use hotel rooms, there is an opportunity for the hoteliers to club other services that your hotel may provide – spa, gym, restaurant, or any other service that may need an advanced booking – with the day-use room and create another stream of revenue.
Understanding Day Use Hotel Room Customers
1) Business Travel
There are many professionals (consultants, sales representatives, etc.) who travel to a city, take a couple of meetings, and travel back. A day-use hotel room is perfect for such guests who need the hotel room for a few hours to freshen up and prepare for their meeting.
They might even conduct meetings in the hotel’s conference rooms thus providing another opportunity for the hotelier to fully utilize their hotel’s spaces which may have been underutilized before.
2) Business Events
Similar to business travels, business events such as a gala, charity relief, seminars, etc. are a perfect use case for day-use hotel rooms where the employees can be provided with their own private space to prepare for the event, freshen up, and take a breather if needed.
This provides a goldmine of potential revenue to be earned for the hotelier by offering corporate bundles including day-use hotel rooms for shorter events.
3) Layover Leisure
One can trace the genesis of the day-use hotel rooms idea to airport layovers where travelers were using the hotel room often only for a few hours but paying the rent for the entire day.
Introducing day-use hotel rooms is an absolute win-win in this scenario where hoteliers can serve multiple layovers during the day and the travelers are provided with more options of where they want to rest during their long layovers.
4) Work From Hotel
With remote/hybrid work on the rise, day-use hotel rooms which are designed to allow guests to be able to work out of the room is a pretty solid use case. Whether someone is looking for a change, or they have too many meetings to attend their home is too noisy and cafes do not afford privacy, a day-use hotel room is perfect.
Hotels can tap into another opportunity to provide Work From Hotel (WFH) packages to corporates to boost their revenue.
5) Special Occasions
Since day-use hotel rooms can be offered for a discounted rate as it is to be used for only a few hours, it can open up various possibilities such as celebrating an anniversary or a birthday (with Spa and massages), going on day-dates with your partner, or indeed celebrating Valentine’s day.
This provides yet another opportunity for a hotelier to market their rooms in a way that sells an experience of celebration, and luxury at a reasonable price.
Integrate Day Use Hotel Rooms in Your Booking Engine
Now that you have understood the importance and the potential of offering day-use hotel rooms, the natural next question would be, how to do it? STAAH’s SwiftBook Booking Engine has just the feature for you.
The Day Use Room feature incorporates all the insights mentioned in the blog so far and makes it extremely user-friendly for the hotelier to leverage this opportunity and step into the future of the modern hospitality world.
