Yotel Unleashes New Ambitions With Eye on Empty Office Buildings
Skift Take
We hadn't heard much from Yotel as a hotel chain for a while. Turns out it has recharged its ambitions for world domination. We're intrigued by its pitch that its micro-hotel design matches well for conversions of decades-old office buildings. Boldness or bravado?
Early Check-In
Editor’s Note: Skift Senior Hospitality Editor Sean O’Neill brings readers exclusive reporting and insights into hotel deals and development, and how those trends are making an impact across the travel industry.Think you know Yotel? Think again.
Before the pandemic, the hotel chain Yotel was best-known for running a handful of airport locations that had tiny rooms of about 200 square feet or 16 square meters in size.After the pandemic, the UK-based hospitality management company has 36 properties open or under contract. These projects are a mix of city hotels. A minority of properties are at airports. Its new brand is YotelPad, which it calls "extended-stay residences," with rooms in a variety of sizes, including up to 600 square feet and even a two-bedroom version. The properties offer kitchenettes, laundry facilities, and co-working spaces and sometimes sit above flagship Yotels.Yotel isn't a clone of Japanese pod hotels.
Japan's capsule hotels are an extreme concept. "They're coffins," jokes Viriot. Yotel rooms (called "cabins"), especially at airports, are quite small by Western standards and they do typically feature fold out or expanding beds. But they're not as small as pod hotels.In July, Yotel said it would open a hotel in Tokyo in 2024. Did that mean it stole the capsule hotel concept from the Japanese and is now s