Welcome to the rise of 'no frills' (and sometimes no towels) hotels

Read article : Welcome to the rise of 'no frills' (and sometimes no towels) hotels

Lianne Livingstone, a Canadian living in Luxembourg, recently stayed in an F1 hotel – a famously cheap French chain – near Amsterdam with her husband and two children. “The facility itself was fine if you were super strapped, and it was clean,” Livingstone says. “But the beds were probably the cheapest, most solid beds I’ve slept on, and the linens were practically transparent.”

Welcome to the rise of “no frills” (and sometimes no towels) hotels. As more and more hotels across the globe are adding a mind-boggling number of amenities and extras – from free minibars and laundry facilities to bath butlers and pet concierges – there’s also a parallel, but polar opposite, trend of hotels stripped down to the barest essentials.

Tune Hotels, a Malaysian chain with properties in Asia and the UK, offer bare bones and cheap accommodations, but if you want towels, a safe and a TV, or even a window, you’ll have to pay extra. Tune Hotels is in the midst of opening seven hotels across the UK, including several properties in London.

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Meanwhile, EasyHotel – owned by EasyJet – has now opened up in several countries across Europe and recently announced several new hotels in the Middle East. They’re explicit that guests will be sacrificing “a bit of luxury space” in return for cheaper rates. The staffing is minimal, the rooms are tiny, and the TV, WiFi and even luggage storage come àla carte.

Even several big chains – including Holiday Inn Express and Hilton – have started offering “value rooms” with no room service and limited amenities.

But are these bare-bones hotels worth the savings? And where does this new proliferation of budget hotels fit into a hospitality world where one high-end hotel – the Park Hyatt Vienna – will actually take your dog out for an evening at the opera?

For some, ultra-budget accommodations fall on the grim end of the hospitality spectrum.Michele Sponagle from Paris, Ont. found that her biggest issue at the F1 hotel in Avignon was the communal bathroom. “The shower room was pretty yucky, with hair and soap bits swimming around the drain,” she says. (She stuck her feet in two plastic shopping bags so she didn’t have to touch the floor.)

Shared bathrooms have long been a feature of budget accommodations in hostels and small guest rooms the world over. Some amenities – a lack of canine opera excursions, for example – are rarely considered deal breakers. As people increasingly rely on their computers to binge watch crime procedurals and even stream the local news, a television might no longer be the essential service it once was. Others amenities, such as paying extra for a room with a window at a Tune Hotel, might well be worth the splurge.

Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

While many hotels report that guests don’t like the feeling of being “nickel and dimed” – an assumption that has led many luxury properties to roll things like breakfast and minibars into the overall room cost – these budget properties give guests the ability to pick and choose, opting out of, say, the hairdryer they were never going to use anyway.

Julia Buckley from Cornwall, UK has stayed at Tune Hotels in Kuala Lumpur, Penang and London. “I really like the fact that it’s a hostel price, but of a certain standard,” she says. “The rooms will be clean and, if you pay for the extras like WiFi and windows, it ends up feeling like a normal hotel, but still cheaper. The only thing I didn’t like is the really cruddy toiletries they give you, but I learned that lesson after Kuala Lumpur and brought my own to the rest.”

As with cheaper airfares, à la carte hotel options can add up if you choose every optional amenity. At the Tune Hotel Liverpool Street in London, the cheapest room starts at £66 – an extraordinarily reasonable sum in a city where the average hotel room costs more than double that. But Tune Hotels also offers a full list of à la carte options that can be added to the tab, including room cleaning (£8), early check in or late check out (£15), television or Wi-Fi (£4 per night each), towel and toiletry kit with soap and shampoo (£2), and a hair dryer or in-room safe (£2).

These budget hotels align nicely with the parallel trend of declining airfares, and a broader trend often referred to as the democratization of travel. Flying across the globe used to be an elite privilege for the few; now, teenagers book intercontinental travel and all-inclusive vacations for spring break. Budget hotel rooms are helping make tourism that much more accessible. Swidlicka, who has stayed in two windowless EasyHotel rooms in London, says that these economical services are ideal for DIY travellers, backpackers, young couples, students “and other people with low budgets and big dreams.”

Cheap, after all, is tempting. Sponagle says that despite her less-than-ideal initial experience, she would be game to stay at an F1 hotel in the future – especially now that she knows the ropes. “I’d pack flip flops for the shower room,” Sponagle says. For an amazingly affordable €45 a night, it certainly wasn’t all bad, she says. “I lived to tell the tale.”