Hotel Designers Adapt to Blended Travel
Photo Credit: A Zoku Loft XL unit in Vienna aims to offer options to live, work, and play to bleisure travelers. Zoku Hospitality
Skift Take
Many hotel brands are tearing down the walls between business and pleasure, figuratively and literally. Bleisure travel seems here to stay. So some hotels are making long-lasting design changes in response.
When leisure travel bounced back quicker than business travel, hoteliers were quick to adjust their marketing campaigns and, like Miami’s Surfcomber, make speedy updates to enhance the amount of poolside furniture.
But longer term, many brands are incorporating more permanent design considerations that account for the needs of the blended traveler, who combine business with leisure travel. Far beyond enhancing Wi-Fi capabilities or adding power ports, these functional changes are a wide-ranging response to blended travel coming of age.
Fostering ConnectionThe social needs of the digital nomad — and how to satisfy them through design — was always one of the top priorities for Zoku, whose (mostly) long-term loft accommodations are spacious micro apartments with kitchen facilities and workout gear. But as revolutionary as the all-in-one concept is, said co-founder Hans Meyer, one element could easily be missing from such a concept, namely: connection.
Experiencing life first-hand as a digital nomad, Meyer lived and worked remotely throughout Africa, Central America, the Middle East, and Europe.
“I was surprised to find that the hardest part of living this lifestyle wasn’t the language barrier, the need to adapt to new cultures, or being unfamiliar with how to navigate a new city best, but rather the feeling of loneliness that occurred whe
