Time.news – Who wouldn’t want to live in a hotel? It is not just a dream, literary or romantic in itself from times gone by, when characters like Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, Julio Camba, Agatha Christie could afford it. What has meant that some of the brightest pages in recent history have been written by rooms that have usually been in transit, is also what many hotels offer today in search of new business formulas. Especially in Spain, where stays in the Spanish hotel sector fell by 70% due to the pandemic. And the rooms need to be filled up again. Whatever it takes.
The Paìs writes, according to which some of the hotels have recovered a model of the past, when hotels were part of the national housing ecosystem and offered a flexible solution to long-stay travelers and residents of all social classes.
“The chains then launched offers for people living in their homes for € 500 a month. They have bet on keeping digital nomads and travelers with offers that have made possible what until then was a chimera: living in a hotel ”, reports the Madrid newspaper, according to which so far it has been a“ mirage ”. But “regardless of the purchasing power of the tenant, living in a hotel does not pay off. But that the economy is not the only factor that explains the change of model “.
Yet, underlines Paìs, “there is something ambitious in hotel life. Everyone has always fantasized about going out of their room and finding the bed made around the corner, the sheet with a fold as if it were the page of a book, encouraging them to go back to sleep where they left off. But few can afford it ”, observes the newspaper.
According to the data of the National Institute of Statistics, Inethe average rate per room is just over 105 euros, making it cost on average a month in a hotel around 3,150 euros. That is four times the average cost of a rental in Spain, estimated at 674 cars per month.
Therefore, all that remains is the re-enactment of the times that were, when “the Palace was a meeting point for the upper classes”, explains Paloma Garcìa, marketing manager of Westin Palace in Madrid, the legendary hotel in Madrid, who underlines: “Before , communicating was more complicated; if you wanted to get into a certain social circle, people had to know where you were. And if you were someone, you had to be at the palace. The European nobility was seen in the Neptuno Grill, the hotel restaurant ”. While now things have changed “and“ communications are more fluid, being in contact is easier and it is no longer necessary to live in these places to relate, ”García reflects.
The residential model changed after Airbnb
Among the changes that have taken place, there are also those that have brought new players to the market, such as Airbnb, for example. “Stays of more than a month on Airbnb account for a quarter of bookings on this platform, according to company data. New projects such as aparthotels, with their short-term leases, furnished rooms, and shared facilities, recreate many of the benefits that residential hotels once offered. The same happens with university residences and nursing homes, which focus on specific social groups ”.
in short, Paìs points out, “that era of the hotel industry is over in which the nobles met in the tea rooms of the five stars and the workers who had just arrived in the city slipped into the pensions in the center. A time of which stories and stories remain ”while“ many of the most iconic celebrities of the 20th century spent their days in a hotel ”. Coco Chanel decorated her room at the Ritz in Paris at will, Oscar Wilde ended her days in a hotel in the French capital, although he did it with less luxury and less money.
The Baron Hotel, where Agatha Christie stayed
Agatha Christie lived straddling the best hotels in the world, which she recorded in her books. Lady crime wrote Murder on the Orient Express in room 411 of the Pera Palace in Istanbul, an establishment overlooking the Golden Horn where the European cream of the crop rested after traveling the mythical path. Julio Camba wrote his last columns in room 383 of the Palace and Hemingway told the world about the Spanish Civil War from Florida to Madrid.
In any case, the hotel in Spain has never had such a marked residential use as in other countries, like the United States. “What was common was that members of the wealthiest strata of society spent long periods in hotels, that is, from one to three months,” says Carlos Larrinaga, professor of history and economic institutions at the University of Granada, author of a book on tourism and hotels. “Living in a hotel is rare, a rarity,” he says. Still, this rarity has fascinated the inhabitants of the house for decades, to the point of creating a legend around the exception.
While, in the meantime, tourism has become the sector that contributes most to the Spanish economy, with a total of 176,000 million euros a year, equal to 14.6% of GDP, so much so that “hotels are great economic importance in Spain and continue to be a source of attraction, interest and novelty, as evidenced by the hotel boom in Madrid with the recent openings of hotels such as the Four Seasons and The Edition and the renovations of the Ritz, the Santo Mauro or the Rosewood Villamagna, among others ”, notes Paìs.
However, few are those whose “entire life cycle can take place in hotels, from birth to death”. However, no one can deny that these places continue to exert a certain fascination on the public. “To live forever an eternal holiday and postpone the check out beyond life itself”.