My urban flat produces some extra-euros, as if it were an hotel room where clients may as well work, co-work, conduct business meetings. As do hotels. Aren’t we spending most of our working time in our flat, co-working spaces, hotels ?
At the feet of my urban office stands a co-living place where people gather and have a drink, work, co-work, share, use the services of a conciergerie, etc. Sometimes, a market place in the grand lobby, with food events.
Where experience primes, surface has a monetizable use, new money from volumes that used to stand unprofitable. This modularity challenges the urbanistic affectation, but not only. Looming sensors, facial recognition tools, pull and carry some social model disruptions (scoring and social credit), and stir some collective push for more data protection (RGPD in Europe).
So, the point is to wonder whether we are not entering into :
1. Interacting service plaforms, collecting and addressing datas, where brands cross-sell through enhanced partnerships,
2. Clusters (clients hyper segmentation),
Met in spaces falling obviously standardized, as real estate prices in the megacities call upon modularity.
Consequently,
1. the old days corporate hotel (with its lot of dark meeting rooms, bland functional 200 square feet rooms above),
2. could well be converted into some new office-services building (and reciprocally), with modularity, adequate spared & vacant volumes, heavy 3D use, and convenient on site array of services,
3. So that be on-demand converted into what-you-need (ex: this morning a 5 offices + an adjacent meeting room, tonight an extended Suite), and occur a real enhanced experience (anticipated by adequate predictive modelling based on your past reservations and your social cluster’s preferences).
This new “social places where people can meet and dine and have a local experience” is the most astute marketing recreation of what a restaurant or a bar used to be for generations, but was lost with those good-old days corporate hotels where the deserted canteen/cafeteria-like outlets hosted the very few, reluctant at asking for uninspiring room-service (when any). Welcome back to the augmented saloon !!
But Boutique and high-end luxury hotels shall go on separately, and should prosper and form a growing niche, as long as service, deco and unique locations, prevail on what tech has best to offer. Not that they be the only ones which really attend their clients’ needs. If datas mean knowledge, very few can really pretend : their acquisitions have not been, for years, qualifying.
But they will at least always charm faithful worshippers for their exceptional business model, that requires engagement, and passion. The kind of lovingkindness that flies away from mobility, modularity, and hates hasty minutes and passing theories.