Atlantic Canada — Hotels are struggling both to entice visitors to book trips and to fill vacant staff positions. Experts agree that the hotel industry is perfect as is, so the reason hotels are having such difficulty must be…the pandemic. Staying in a hotel is amazing, so it’s evidently the customer’s fault for taking their dollars elsewhere and forcing hotels into bankruptcy.
Here are the top 8 things that the industry definitely, for sure should keep the same in these tumultuous times:
- The high prices: Airbnb is something that exists, but it’s kind of cute how hotels don’t even try to compete with the swanky loft a block away going for $40 a night. A couple hundred bucks is completely fair for somewhere you’re literally only going to pass out for a few hours. The industry is in dire straits, but the prices, if anything, are too low.
- The late check-in: When travellers arrive in a new city in the morning or early afternoon, the last thing they want to go is get rid of their gigantic, bulky suitcases and take a quick shower before hitting the town. Obviously, they would prefer to lug their bags somewhere they can sit and kill time till 2 p.m., when hotels let them enter the room they already paid an arm and a leg for.
- The early check-out: This is something everyone enjoys — who would want to sleep in, lounge in bed, watch TV, order room service, take a bath and read a book in the room they paid $200 to exist inside? A full 24 hours is excessive. While the industry may be dying, we can all agree that those 11 a.m. checkout times are the best.
- That single, thin, weightless comforter: It’s weird that weighted blankets are so popular, because, clearly, people prefer to fitfully drift into a shallow sleep while covered in a paper-thin, barely there duvet.
- Breakfast that ends at 8 a.m.: Much like the early checkin, hotels know that people who enjoy eating free food like to do so before sunrise. That’s just common knowledge. Even better if that food is a stale muffin wrapped in plastic and an underripe banana.
- Parking for an additional charge: Guests love the freedom of paying some random third-party company $20 a night to park in the garage near to the hotel, not actually at the hotel. Hotels should make sure this becomes the rule rather than the exception.
- The A/C that turns off and on throughout the night no matter what: White noise is great for sleeping, but what’s even better is white noise that chokes itself out and thunderously resumes periodically throughout the entire night, so the guest never fully enters a REM cycle. It’s part of what gives hotels their charm, and it should never change.
- Bars offering drinks you can get next door for half the price: Why explore the city and its cool haunts when you can simply sit at the hotel bar and have a domestic beer for $11 served by a guy wearing a vest that matches the corridor carpeting?