New website provides hotels with opportunity to sell rooms by the hour
A new website selling hotel rooms for daytime use by-the-hour is reporting a rapid growth in business since being launched in the UK earlier this year.
Dayuse-hotels.com is currently working with 20 hotels in London and one near Winchester - the Marwell hotel. Many of the hotels are receiving around 300 bookings per month, while in Paris, where the website was founded, properties are taking an additional 100 monthly bookings.
Thibaud d'Agreves, one of the co-founders of Dayuse, said that the idea for the website came about when working at L'Hotel Amour in Paris, a property which regularly achieved 100% occupancy.
"A group of us together decided that by selling rooms for a number of hours during the day when they are normally empty was the ideal way to boost occupancy beyond 100%," he explained.
Two years after the launch of Dayuse-hotels.com, the website receives 50,000 unique visitors per month and between 1,500 and 2,000 registered reservations, with prices charged at 30-70% of the regular per night rate. Rooms can be booked for periods of three to seven hours, depending on the hotel's availability.
Most hotels featured on the website are independently owned and in the three- to five-star sector. London hotels taking part include the Town Hall in Shoreditch, the St John in Soho and the Beaufort in Knightsbridge.
Michael Benjamins, corporate sales manager of the Town Hall hotel, said the property had found Dayuse to be an excellent way of generating additional business. "It's such a great concept and there is definitely a real demand for it. Hotels can bring incremental revenue by maximising rooms that would otherwise be sitting empty during the afternoons," he explained.
As well as being used for romantic rendezvous, rooms being sold by-the-hour are also proving popular with business people who want to freshen up after a long journey.
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By Janet Harmer
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