Imagine arriving at a hotel at 9 in the morning after a long flight and being able to go into your room, open your suitcase and take a shower Imagine. Imagine something else: being able to leave your hotel At 6 pm, after a day at the beach. Keep imagining. imagine doing it no extra cost. Sounds like traveling science fiction. If you know how to imagine what it is to have to leave a hotel at noon, when what you want is have breakfast and go back to sleep. That is easy.
Do check-in and check-out without schedule will be more and more common, but it is still a extravagance. The new nomad wants to manage his time: contemporary luxury it has to do with feeling that we control our life. Is a delusion, but it works for us.
Lobby, The Hoxton, Barcelona.
Until now the Hotels, airlines Y restaurants they told us when we had to arrive, fly and eat. Now, we decide; either we are starting To do it.
The Hoxtons it is a hotel seal that allows it to be done. His philosophy is: “everything you need and nothing you don't” and has detected that what the nomad of today requires is flexibility. In 2019 he launched his service flexytime, that offers, if you book through its website, choose the time of entry and exit of the hotel at no extra cost. This facilitates early risers, partygoers, sufferers of long flights and early or late BIRDS settle in all their hotels (elastic) when they decide, without waiting.
This can also be done in the newly opened The Hoxton Barcelona, the eleventh of the chain and the first in Spain. Located in a building by Juli Capella in Poblenou, this hotel was born with flexible vocation and lots of homework done. its director, Christina Imaz, speaks of “a paradigm shift. For us it is the hotel that must adapt to the client and not the client to the hotel”. The hotel puts itself in the shoes, or in flip flops (this is Barcelona, we are next to the Mediterranean and there is a swimming pool on the terrace) of those who stay in it.
The Hoxton adapts to everyone and in all its spaces. The lobby is, at the same time, a bar, workspace, and a place where you can have a hamburger, a cocktail or a coffee Three Marks Coffee, one of the local projects with which the hotel is allied.
Winery, The Hoxton, Barcelona.
This brand, since it was founded in 2006 in Shoreditch, wanted to make hotel lobbies his hallmark, because they are the ones that reflect the vibration of the neighborhood they are in and these hotels want it to be known What neighborhoods are they in? According to Alex Trilla, its brand manager, “Hoxton is proud of its lobby culture. The one from Poble Nou receives people from the area: the majority liberal professionals and residents of one of the most interesting areas of the city (the most?).
This isn't the only sign of Hoxton flexibility, though it is the most outrageous. Here's more: homey rooms can accommodate two or four people without increasing the rate; In addition, they have a kitchen with a empty fridge that you can fill with products from the Bodega, which is a grocery store which is located on the ground floor and sells interesting products such as Bonilla potatoes, Ortiz preserves or natural wines at, surprise, supermarket prices.
The Barcelona hotel poses to offer one of these homey rooms in airbnb. Did we want flexibility? That is. In addition, the store, where you can buy from an oil Rowse to some glasses Ethnicity Barcelona going through a bathing suit Brava Fabrics, it doesn't look like a store and the reception could be a kiosk
Homey Room, The Hoxton, Barcelona.
The spaces themselves events they are particular: they are designed to function without waiters, as if the living room of a house, and in them you can record a podcast or hold a meeting. And if you have a dog you can bring it with you and let it sleep at your feet. When we talk about elastic hotels, we mean exactly this.
The flexibility is in future plans of the hotels and it sounds like heavenly music for today's travelers. A hotel, if it wants to be a reflection of society, must accompany it in its elasticity. The ways of traveling are mutating: we cross work and pleasure, business trips with family, we have broken the holiday patterns: Do we still have to enter a hotel at three in the afternoon?
life, work and even relationships are more flexible, there is no point in continuing to eat breakfast from 7 to 10 or check-in between 2 and 3 in the afternoon. Break industry patterns established is very complex And it's easy to pontificate from the couch, but it's legit aspire to travel more freely.
Views from The Hoxton, Barcelona.
Flexibility has always been territory of luxury, that it could afford bigger templates and more organizational systems…. flexible. Large hotel groups such as Marriott allow you to request early check-in and delay check-out, business flights have often been able to adapt to the travelers needs with more lightness; also some loyalty programs they provide this benefit as an advantage. What hotel would not want to be able to offer the best to your guests.
For Cristina, this system "it's not that complicated" Account in the Taqueria from the terrace, a few days after the opening and in one of his rare moments of rest. A week later, more calmly, she elaborates: “Good communication is the key: Productive logistics meetings are necessary to know how to play with our inventory. It's very important anticipate and communicate between teams."
She repeats the word anticipate frequently. Let's note: new words are added to the hotel vocabulary of the contemporary nomad as flexibility and anticipation; they are no longer a luxury, but something to look forward to. We don't want to waste our precious time, or at least we want to handle it at our whim.
Only You Boutique Hotel, Madrid.
The pandemic accelerated this rupture of the conventional schedules of the hotel world. Peninsula launched, in January 2021, its program Peninsula Time, which extends check-in and check-out hours: depending on the channels in which a room is reserved you can enter it from 6 in the morning and go out until 10 at night.
The name, Peninsula Time, is a statement of intent: here the hotel is not only selling space, it is selling time. Another paradigm that is tottering is that of fixed times for breakfast. In the Only YOU Boutique Hotel , in the Madrid neighborhood of Chueca, you can a la carte breakfast at any time of day. Again, it is about dancing with the traveler to the same rhythm.
Private pool in a 16th century Airbnb house in Puglia, Italy.
Airbnb collects this sensitivity and has launched the one that advertises as “the biggest change in the ten years of life on its platform. All these new services and improvements accompany travelers in a new way to travel in which accommodations are combined and searches are carried out by categories.
When entering the search, the option to “Flexible Search: Travel wherever and whenever” and that is where the ideas unfold: greek house, barn, ryokan, yurt, teal or in a house that has a grand piano. A pool or a piano to improvise at the end of the day are as destination as Central Park. We also have to relax our traveling heads.