DayBreakHotel: rooms and services available during the day only, at discounted rates
The app covers 8,000 hotels in 16 countries. “Profits for affiliated hotels are set to rise by up to 30%”
Key points
Use spas, swimming pools, restaurants, meeting rooms and rooftop terraces without booking an overnight stay. This is the service offered by DayBreakHotels via its website and app, which allow users to choose hotel facilities – even during the day – at any of the 8,000 affiliated properties across 16 countries.
“When we started out thirteen years ago, the hotel was, in the public imagination, a building with rooms dedicated exclusively to tourists – almost an extraterritorial space within our cities,” says Simon Botto, founder and CEO of daybreakhotels.com. “Today, thanks in part to us, that is no longer the case: people see hotels as flexible spaces, which is why we wanted to make everything a hotel has to offer easy to book, including – and especially – for those who live in the same city.”
The new service
The aim is to offer benefits to both customers and hotels. In most cases, bookings include free cancellation, no advance payment is required, and the rates for day use are up to 75 per cent lower than the cost of an overnight stay.
A new clientele
At the same time, hotels are tapping into a new customer segment. As Daybreakhotel points out, the day-use guest is, in most cases, someone who lives in the same city as the hotel: they are a ‘local guest’ who has the opportunity to return to the same hotel several times for different occasions. This behaviour is not typical of the traditional tourist who, according to data from Federalberghi, stays in a hotel for an average of 3.2 nights and rarely returns to the same hotel within the same year.
DayBreakHotels cites figures showing that, worldwide, one in three hotel rooms remains empty every night; in Italia, the average hotel occupancy rate stands at 55 per cent, amounting to a total of 2.5 billion unsold rooms each year and around 150 billion euros in lost revenue. Added to this is the underutilisation of facilities such as spas, restaurants, meeting rooms, swimming pools and gyms, whose occupancy rates range between 30% and 50%, equating to a further 140 billion in unused assets. DayBreakHotels has increased the turnover of its affiliated properties by up to 10 per cent, with net profits rising by up to 30 per cent, thanks to incremental revenue generated whilst keeping fixed and staff costs unchanged.
