HCNME POINT OF VIEW
SLEEPCATIONS OR
COOLCATIONS? BY MARTIN KUBLER, CHIEF SLOTH AT THE GLUTTONOUS SLOTH, HORECA CONSULTING WITH ATTITUDE
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or years, hotel demand pretty much fell into a relatively small number of segments: business, lei-sure, MICE, groups, etc. For years, the reasons people chose certain hotels over others remained largely unchanged. It’s always a combination of mainly price, location, brand, and possibly service. It’s never about “snazzy
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room control units” or “space-age showers” or “recliners with massage functions.” Asset managers, take note. Similarly, seasonal travel patterns remained largely con-stant. Enter “Generation Z” and burnedout Millennials, and we’re on the brink of a few entirely new travel trends, some of which are somewhat anti-cyclical. Firstly, sleepcations, also known
as nap-cations. Where guests once might have been willing to tolerate a slightly sub-par room in a hotel—because, really, let’s face it, how much time do you actually spend in the room if you’re sightseeing or out on business—the new generation of guests booking sleepcations are unlikely to do so. For them, the room is everything. Forget about the lobby as the heart of the hotel and various fancy F&B outlets—sleepcation bookers are, unsurprisingly, all about the room, the bed, and, well, sleep and relaxation. According to research, sleep tourism is a growing travel trend predicted to dominate the industry over the next year, driven by 1 in 3 adults who are estimated to miss out on sufficient sleep in their normal lives. There’s a hotel in London that now has a “Sleep Concierge,” while a hotel in Switzer-land offers a “sleep diagnostic programme.” Now, you might say that sleeping and relaxing has al-ways been part of staying in a hotel for leisure, but sleepcations take this a step further. Think of the rare pleasure of going to bed knowing that you can sleep as long as you want without a rigid breakfast schedule, sunrise yoga sessions, or other activities that, because you paid for them, you’d be afraid of missing out on. Will napcations catch on? I don’t know. Let me sleep on it, and I’ll tell you what I think. While sleepcations are at least vaguely amusing, coolcations have a much more serious back-ground. Climate change, rising summer temperatures, an increase in forest fires, and, take Spain for example, more frequent droughts, mean that travellers are shifting their summer vacations to cooler destinations. Personally, I can see the appeal in this—I spent last year’s summer holidays in our summer house in Spain with temperatures of more than 40 degrees Celsius. You might snort at this if you’re based in the UAE or KSA, but with electricity prices in Spain being what they are, it’s prohibitively expensive to run the air conditioning all day, so you end up slowly melting through the day, whether indoors or outdoors. This year, I declined and went north instead. The Nordics and the Baltic