Hotel lobbies are one of my guilty pleasures. They rank right up there with airport bars and for similar reasons -- people coming and going to and from places all around the world, interesting conversations to be had, a feeling of connectivity.
The hotel lobby is truly a thing of beauty, especially when it's designed with the right aesthetic and layout. It's like living in a vibrant city. You have a range of choices for dining and drinking downstairs, and when it's time to call it a night, you just have to hop on the elevator.
The hotel lobby is also important. A recent article in Skift titled, Why the Hotel Lobby Is the Perfect Antidote to Airbnb, revealed the following nuggets:
The hotel lobby, when magically done, is a reason to eschew a rented apartment and choose a more traditional lodging option.
Airbnb can be isolating: you’re an island on your own. Arriving late at night into an unfamiliar apartment building that hopefully lives up to the stylized photos. With a good hotel, the lobby serves as an inviting welcome and the central nervous system of experience. Where even if you’re alone you can be around others in an ambient sense. We are humans, after all, and like being around others (though we may claim that we don’t). Atmosphere counts for a lot.
An excellent hotel lobby is like a coral reef, refreshed every day or even every hour with new and incredible fish. There’s magic in the anonymity of people watching, there’s serendipity, there’s socializing and there’s revelry.
The truth is, people don't get these same joys from staying in a rented apartment. An Airbnb is more like a submarine than a coral reef, albeit it can be a very nice submarine.
There are a whole different set of benefits that come from staying in a rented room -- the ability to shop local markets and actually use the ingredients, the opportunity to meet the neighbors and get a local perspective, to feel what it's like to actually "live" in a place, to feel "at home" -- but the hotel lobby just cannot be replicated.
Instead of fighting the threats of home rentals like Airbnb and VRBO, hotels should embrace what they already have, what those other companies cannot offer.
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