Service Apartment Or Hotels – Preferred Choice
Service Apartments are a much preferred option than Hotels, especially for long stays. The ‘home’ and ‘space’ factor play a dominant role to ensure a pleasant stay. A typical hotel room is about 200 square feet and accommodates a bed, study and coffee table. If a guest has to spend sometime in the room, the only option is the study or the coffee chair beside his bed. With this limitation, a stay in the hotel is not pleasurable after couple of days. Even inviting friends / colleagues over is not possible. Compare this crampy situation with a service apartment which offers the same spacious bed room with a house attached to it! Service apartments come with a drawing room that typically has a big TV and contemporary sofas. So its always fun to have someone over and play host when you have the space for it. Apart from this, service apartments also offer a dining area with a table that can comfortably seat 4 to 6 people. So you don’t have to think before ordering pizza or Chinese. But why order from outside when service apartments offer a fully equipped kitchen? A kitchen in a typical service apartment comes with a RO water system, microwave, stove & gas, refrigerator, pots & pans and unlimited refills of sugar, tea bags and coffee powder. With all this, its fun to cook your own meal. You could make a visit to the local market and buy the seasonal veggies and try out local recipes! Yet again, you wouldn’t have to cook as service apartments go one step further by providing gourmet cooks who toss up a yummy meal in your own kitchen, made fresh and piping hot!
With all that a service apartment has to offer, it is only logical to think that the price of a service apartment would be much more expensive than a hotel room. But this is where service apartments score against hotels. Service apartments are cheaper to hotels, when it comes to long stays. As an industry thumb rule, the daily rack rates of service apartments are discounted by a whopping 50% for customers who opt for the monthly plan. Such a huge discount goes very well with the customer and ensures customer loyalty to the service apartment company on future stays as well. But is this feasible from the service apartment company’s perspective. Very well, as a long stay customer ensures to keep the occupancy of the property high, and also the ancillary spend of such long stay customers on say laundry, cooks, snacks, internet top-ups, cabs etc yield good revenue. And don’t forget, the customer pays the entire amount for the stay upfront so the company enjoys immediate liquidity.
Given this win – win situation, service apartments are truly giving hotels a run for their money. So much, that hoteliers itself are investing their money into service apartments.
