The Microhotel, a Category Seeing a Growth Spurt, Makes Small Stylish

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The Moxy Chelsea in New York City. Though their rooms are small, microhotels often have spacious lobbies that invite hanging out and co-working.

They appeal to senior citizens and millennials, business travelers and backpackers. And they’re particularly attractive to hotel developers, who can pack in more guest rooms than in a typical hotel.

They’re known as microhotels, inspired by the Japanese capsule or pod hotels of 40 years ago that offered cheap, tiny accommodations to businessmen.

The new versions — which are most common in but not exclusive to big, expensive cities like New York, London and Paris — are designed, as one hotel expert put it, down to their last square inch. Their guest rooms are small — often half, or less, the size of a typical room in an urban hotel — with furniture that often can be folded up or stowed away, and bathrooms that usually have showers and toilets but no bathtubs. Wall-mounted TVs are also major space savers.

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Harbor town in Germany unveils urban- chic hostel made out of repurposed shipping containers

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Berlin-based Holzer Kobler Architekturen and Kinzo Architekten have collaborated on Germany’s first upcycled hostel and its nothing short of spectacular. The Dock Inn is made out of multiple repurposed shipping containers that have been carved out to create 64 guest rooms which all feature a vibrant interior design that mixes urban chic with industrial charm.

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Inter Continental Hotels launch AI smart rooms in China

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InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG®) announced that InterContinental® Hotels & Resorts has collaborated with Baidu to introduce the next generation of intelligent hospitality – smart rooms, which are powered by artificial intelligence.

From now on, guests staying at InterContinental® Beijing Sanlitun and InterContinental® Guangzhou Exhibition Centre will be among the first to enjoy the AI smart rooms. A total of 100 AI powered Club InterContinental suites will be available at InterContinental hotels in gateway cities and key destinations across China within the year.

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Darkhotel tricks hotel Wi-Fi users into downloading malicious software

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Business travelers beware of Darkhotel.

There are a lot of reasons not to use Wi-Fi in a hotel. It’s often expensive, sluggish, and unreliable. Sometimes it seems like nobody knows the network password, and when trouble arises it’s hard to convince the front desk that there’s a problem with their network, not one with your devices.

 

 

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How the collaborative economy will change the way we travel

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Airbnb doesn’t need to build or own inventory, it facilitates access to existing assets, such as spare rooms, holiday houses, entire islands or treehouses.

At the annual Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals conference (HITEC) in Los Angeles, Rachel Botsman, Founder of Collaborative Labs, talked about how the collaborative economy will transform the hospitality ecosystem. She was talking to a group whose sector was getting hit hard and fast by the ideas she was going to share. How do hoteliers really feel about Airbnb?

 

 

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What mobile features travelers want most from hotels

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74% of all travelers surveyed were open to having hotels proactively enhancing their stay.

The iPhone was launched less than seven years ago, yet we tend to forget how life was ‘before’ the advent of smartphones. Social media has flipped the power from brands to travelers, with review sites now common and influential in the decision-making process. Not to mention everyday access to increasing amounts of content and services now accessible via tablets and smartphones 24/7, anywhere in the world. How are hotels embracing thia change?

 

 

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Top female business travel trends

A quarter of women business travelers fly more now than they did five years ago.

The independent research reveals that women have their own distinct travel habits that differentiate female travelers from their male colleagues, according to new research by Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT). Twenty-five percent of women business travelers fly more now than they did five years ago and women tend to plan their business travel further in advance than men, with 39 per cent making arrangements less than four weeks in advance compared to 20 per cent of men, who tend to plan just a few days ahead.

 

 

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Non-smokers who stay in non-smoking hotel rooms test positive for smoke exposure

You can still be exposed to smoke in non-smoking rooms.

Rooms become “reservoirs of tobacco smoke toxicants that accumulate in carpets, dust, upholstery, mattresses, curtains and furniture, penetrate wallpaper and paint, and are even stored in drywall when they are continually smoked in. Experts refer to this as “third-hand smoke” and no one is sure how to clean it up. And while it’s easy enough to keep smokers confined to designated rooms, smoke itself is harder to contain.

 

 

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More travelers splurging on luxury in the sky

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More travelers are splurging in the air and scrimping on the ground.

A new study by American Express Business Insights finds that spending on first- and business-class airline tickets increased by 9.1% and 5.4%, respectively, in the third quarter. But on the ground, travelers spent more of their dollars — an additional 10.5% — on economy lodging vs. only 2.2% more on luxury hotel accommodations in that time.

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Hotels use RFID chips to keep linens from travelling to new destinations

To keep robes and towels from checking out, a small but growing number of hotels are starting to use new radio frequency chips to keep track of their inventory.
The RFID technology — which stands for radio frequency identification and requires an installed chip that can be read by an electronic reader — has been used by various industries for several years to organize product storage and tally shipments…

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