Our Utopian Ideas

Ok, this one's been nagging me for quite a while.

Have you ever been taken to a mall after the stormous night out with your friends just to find yourself tagging along your wife through N-th shoe parlor? Has your fligh ever been delayed trapping you for hours in a foreign airport?

It happens for me all the time.

That's when I remember my several years old busines idea - Cheap Hotel.

The Idea

Everytime I'm in a/m situation I think about nothing but taking a quick nap for several hours. Supposedly I could find a free bench and crash there. Unfortunately my bag would be stolen just before I would be escorted out of the building by security guards as homeless person. Besides it's not too pleasant to be sleeping in the middle of a crowd.

So, I lack security and privacy. That's where my idea comes in - a small room with a bed you can lock in for several hours - Cheap Hotel.


Facilities

The clusters of "rooms" or more like cells - would be located in some heavily crowded places like malls, airports, stations, etc. Never in an outdoor or deserted enviroment where they're would quickly be vandalized.

Large places of attraction solve one more problem - sanitation. Cheap Hotels would not have to have bathrooms or any other water related facilities of their own. Inhabitants could simply use buildings facilities.

Basic cell would hold only bed. Premium - additional services like wall-TV, touchscreen internet-enabled computer, etc.

Double cells could also be available.


Maintenance

The very big advantage for such service would be that the facility would be almost totally selfmaintainable.

The cells would be equipped with authomatic doors, credit card reader and bed.

Bed shoud be made from some very durable material that cleans easily. Perhaps each inhabitant could be issued some kind of disposable pillow by the built in dispenser.

The whole beauty of this idea is that it would take only one two-person team to maintain several clusters of Check Hotels.


Vandals

Of course, there is still a chance that some dorkhead would take a dump on a bed and leave it there rendering the cell unusable until next routine maintenance round.

Some equipment might also be damaged or destroyed. Although that is very unlikely due to the nature of security in such crowded places.

Supposedly cameras could be installed to use as a proof for vandals, but that would be a real deal-breaker for some of us, wouln'd it'?


Payments

This is the good part. The whole charging would be done by using credit cards.

Say, a tired person wants to take nap. He comes up to a Cheap Hotel. Finds unoccupied cell. Inserts his credit card. The door unclocks. The guy comes in and crashes. In 2 hours his wife calls on his cell to tell shes already met her quota for shoes for today so she's ready to go home.

The guy goes out of the cell. The booth charges his card and spits it out, prints a receipt, says THANK YOU on a tiny LCD display.

The customer is charged for the duration of his "stay" on a per-hour basis plus usage of premiuom facilities (TV, Internet, etc.)


The Cost Of Business

The more I think about this the more I see a success story here. The only thing that concerns me is development of the automated booths.

Other costs should be very small. Due to small footprint of one cell (2-3 square meters) it shouldn't be too expensive to rent an unused space in a mall or airport.


Additional revenue opportunities

• Setting a wake-up timer
• Ads of the nearby services/shops

Updates

06/12/2006

One commenter pointed me to a simmilar invention - a Capsule Hotel in Japan. Thanks!

However this is not the same for a number of reasons:

1. Capsule Hotel is claustrophobic - I would NEVER agree to sleep in such coffin.
2. They're still positioned as a hotel - i.e. they charge for a night, whilst my idea is renting a secure and private location to crash in WHENEVER you want or feel like to and get charged an hourly fee.
3. Capsule Hotels still require attending personnel as well as buildings to maintain. My idea is to utilize spare space (one that might not be attractive to stores) in crowded places. That's why I thing my idea is more cost-effective from the business point of view

There are more things that make Capsule Hotel unattractive in my european eyes, such as you have to leave your luggage in a separate locker (and propably charged for it extra), you have to leave your shoes and wear special slippers, you OBVIOUSLY cannot make sex in there :)