Skift Take
A leading architect has pinpointed these emerging hotel trends, showing just how prevalent the pandemic legacy is within hospitality.
As well as working on a futuristic Atari Hotel, leading hotel architect Tom Ito is starting to see new design trends that are directly related to the pandemic.
It’s all down to remote and hybrid ways of working, but the world of design is now moving on from simply converting hotel rooms to makeshift offices.
Ito, a Gensler architect who launched and heads up the firm’s hospitality practice, has said hotels today are thinking a lot more about secondary cities and airports.
With more people moving out of major cities, more thought has to be put into the design of hotels in suburban areas. Lifestyle hotels are known to focus on local communities, but the same needs to be done for any property in a secondary city, to draw in remote workers who fled big cities during the pandemic.
“Hotels have always been thought of as a ‘third place’ outside of the office,” said Ito, who was a speaker at Skift's Design the Future event in December last year. “It’s not necessarily in the room you want to work, but outside the room to get inspired, or meet with others.” He's also seeing hoteliers look carefully at secondary airports because gateway airports are getting overcrowded as the travel industry recovers. “That’s creating a lot of accessibility problems,” he warned.
“You go there for convenience, and a place to sleep, but make it more of a destination place, as a hub for the community, and really
