My elderly grandmother was on a road trip with my folks to see me graduate from med school, and had a bit of an ‘accident’ requiring some clean-up while on the trip. She was of course, mortified. However, dad handled it coolly, stopped at the nearest motel by the interstate, explained the situation, and got a room for 2 hours for use for clean up. He was willing to pay the full rate, but the proprietor kindly let him rent it for that shorter period.
Everything got tidied up, and all were grateful for such short-term availability of the facilities.
There’s an app called Breather that allows you to rent hotel rooms by the hour. According to friends, it’s actually a game changer for parents with small children. Often, when you’re running errands with kids in the tow, there are just times when you need an hour or two for them to calm down and collect themselves or take a quick nap. Existing public spaces aren’t usually great for that purpose so the ability to just pay $30 to have a private room where you can all chill for an hour is great.
I sometimes ask for early check in. I’m a preferred customer at one major chain. I seldom get in early. The last time, they told me my room was “ready” and it would just be a short time while they inspected it to make everything was okay. It was over an hour before I got in.
If you want to check in at 2:00 instead of 3:00, it’s not usually a problem. If you’re hoping for noon, the chances are slim.
I’ve actually done that and probably will again. There are times when I need to make 10+ hours of driving basically straight through and start to feel that it isn’t in the plans at some point. Your normal Red Roof isn’t real happy when you want to snag a room at noon and leave a few hours later but the more “hooker-ish rooms by the hour” joints just roll with the flow. They also tend to be a lot cheaper.
The Hyatt in the Orlando airport specifically lists day use rooms. This is part of their room description: " Get rested before your next flight with a nap or shower in one of the Day Use Rooms, ideal for families looking to keep the kids entertained while traveling."
I first heard about in from people who were coming off of Disney cruises and needed a place to hang while waiting for a flight. The cruise disembarks early, usually off the ship by ten. Travelers would be in Orlando an hour or so later. If a flight out was not until the evening, having a hotel room to nap or relax in would be very useful. I did not use this as we only needed to kill a couple of hours but would have considered it.
My wife and I stayed at a very nice “by the hour” place during our stay in London in 2014 - the Yotel at Heathrow. We didn’t really sleep there, we had been running around London all that day, our flight was very early in the morning, and we wanted a place where we could re-pack our bags, shower and use their WiFi to post pictures and answer email.
From their page: At YOTELAIR you can check in and out anytime you choose, day or night! Our pricing is by the hour with a 4 hour minimum stay to suit you.
I’m sure there are people using it for sex, but I got the impression that the vast majority were using it for the exact same reasons we were.
A group of four of us once randomly decided at 9pm one night that we wanted to have dinner in Vegas (we were in an eastern LA suburb at the time). We hopped in a car, made the 3.5 hour drive, and spent all night hanging out in town. Around 8:30 in the morning, after breakfast, we decided to head back. We got to Jean (about 30 miles outside of Vegas) when the driver announced he just wasn’t in any condition to drive, and the reality was that none of us were, as we’d all been up around 24 hours at that point. We grabbed a room at one of the casinos and napped for 3 or 4 hours before getting back on the road (and getting home safely).
We paid the full rate, but hourly might have been nice, there.
In the case of flights, being able to offset your time a few hours can result in big savings, as well: if a later flight is $50 cheaper per person, for a family of 4, that’s significant, and spending half of the savings on having a place to stay feels smart.
It depends on the time and what you need. If you just want to get rid of your luggage at 10am, I'm sure a lot of hotels will hold it until you check in whenever while you do touristy things in the area. But if your flight gets in at 10 am and the wedding is not until 4, checking your luggage won't do. Unless you travel in your wedding clothes or want to change in the hotel bathroom. Hotels may allow you to check in an hour or two early - but they won't guarantee it. And I've known people who show up at hotels at 11am or noon* - they are never allowed to check in before 2pm, and that's only if they are lucky. The only way you can guarantee being able to check in that early in the absence of a day rate is to book and pay for the night before.
And you may not be staying overnight after your "day stay" if you have a long layover or your flight leaves hours after your cruise ends so early check in would never be useful in those situations.
They’re crazy. It’s a group trip that involves a 6-7hr drive. Everyone else gets to the hotel at around 4pm, plus or minus an hour. This carload left at 4 or 5am, got there at 10 or 11am and bitched that they couldn’t get into the room until 3pm - every year. You’d think they’d have learned after the first time.
In some cities in the summer, the heat and humidity is horrible. If you have go be outdoors for any period of time, your clothes are drenched with sweat, so I imagine it might be worthwhile to rent a hotel or motel room to shower and change into fresh clothes for afternoon meetings.
That’s useful for passengers, and vital for pilots. Imagine having a layover in some distant city, taking the redeye that night, and really, really needing to be awake for it. It would kinda suck to arrive at the hotel at 9am, leave at 8pm, and pay for two full days.
But I think this is a big enough market that airlines contract with specific hotels to provide it. My dad told me of his airline reserving rooms with blackout curtains so pilots could sleep during the day when their flight schedule required it.
I’ve done that both ways; dropped a suitcase at my hotel when I arrived way before check-in, and left one there after check-out when my train wasn’t 'til evening. It gets you some valuable sightseeing time without having to lug a bag around. They might charge a couple of euros, but I got no problem with that.
I thought it was pretty common for recruiters to rent hotel rooms to conduct interviews in? I’ve been to a couple of them myself while at engineering conferences - they had rooms (actual guest rooms, not ballrooms or meeting rooms) set up as temporary offices for interviewing.
Huh. I have two reservations for hourly rooms for my next international trip. Awkward timing for connecting flights means I’ll be sitting in airports for 10 hours, or I can get an hourly room at a time when I wouldn’t be able to get a regular room.
FWIW, I’ve also had interviews in hotel rooms, usually in a suite at a table during professional conferences. ETA: The conference rooms are full of conference.
At big conferences (E3, etc.) there aren’t enough conference rooms to go around. While big companies will often have small meeting rooms integrated with their booth, floor space is expensive, and smaller players (or cheap ones) will partially or fully move their operations to nearby hotel rooms (often sending someone to the conference to pass out cards saying “Come to Hotel XYZ to see Company ABC’s new stuff”). That might include interviews, meetings, private product demonstrations, etc.
I’ve been in meetings in “conference rooms” which are really hotel rooms the same size as a suite, but instead of a living room with a pull out couch, the extra room had a conference table that seated about 10 people. Smaller and less expensive than the actual meeting/conference rooms.
I feel like you’re answering your own question, here.
You guys are focusing way too much on flights and travel. Hotels aren’t just for travelers. Maybe there is no flight, and “the place I’ll eventually be” is my house. Unfortunately, the wedding is not at my house, it’s at the hotel 15 miles away.
I play in chess tournaments, which are almost always held in hotels. I have 3 hours between rounds, and my house is 45 minutes away. I need to nap. Where am I going to go?
I’m at a work conference from 8 am to 8 pm, with a break in the middle. It’s the biggest conference of the year, and bossman needs me to be on call, but he doesn’t have anything specific for me to do from 11 to 1. I’d really like to kick up my feet and watch TV for awhile, plus I need to charge my equipment, and the bar won’t let me stay there forever, so I gotta mosey. Where would be the ideal place to do that?
I’m giving a presentation to three sets of investors at 10, 2, and 5:30. The morning session ends at 11 and I have 2.5 hours to kill. Gee, it’d be nice to straighten up before I have to be back on stage.
In other words, you need to think of all the things hotels are used for that aren’t traveling, and all the times you’ve got 3 hours to kill and want privacy with some amenities. I could give examples all day.
As mentioned, long layovers that are less than a day. It’s not uncommon for hotels that are in the international terminal of an airport to rent by the hour. You don’t even have to go through customs or passport control, the entire hotel is in the terminal.