Hotel AMY Stories — Three

Guests sometimes ask whether we offer day-use (hourly) stays. It is hard to answer briefly each time, so I would like to take this opportunity to explain in a little more detail.

When we took over the hotel on July 22, we set a few principles. One of them was not to offer day-use stays. As people around us worried, it meant a considerable loss in revenue, and it was a decision that could turn some guests and parts of the market away from us.

Yet it was an unavoidable decision — to offer guests clean and comfortable rooms, to give travelers as much time in their stay as possible, and to stabilize our housekeeping system. Perhaps, as a small hotel, we simply needed to choose and focus.

Physical comfort means changing every used sheet, cleaning the bathroom, and airing out the room. The bathroom in particular should be handed over completely dry, with as much ventilation time as possible. We believed that securing this time to keep rooms clean is the path our hotel should take.

Psychological comfort, I believe, comes when the hotel is filled with guests who use the space with similar lifestyles. Guests who pass one another in a hotel need a sense of mutual understanding. When guests of a similar style use the hotel at similar hours, that shared understanding brings a kind of psychological comfort.

For the physical and psychological comfort of our guests, Hotel AMY decided not to offer day-use stays.

Because of check-in, check-out, and housekeeping, hotels usually keep a gap of four to five hours. Hotel AMY also has a gap of 11:00–15:00 or 12:00–16:00, depending on the booking channel. If we started day-use stays, these gaps would grow and inconvenience our overnight guests.

Hotel AMY decided to focus on guests who stay the night. For their convenience, what matters most is early check-in, late check-out, and a long stay.

For now Hotel AMY keeps a four-hour gap, but we plan to gradually give that time back to our guests. Even now, we actively offer early check-in and late check-out whenever possible.

Hotel AMY has never done day-use housekeeping, but we are told it generally differs from overnight housekeeping.

As a small hotel of 20 rooms run by a minimal team, we must keep our work system simple to reduce variation in quality. If day-use and overnight housekeeping were mixed, either efficiency or quality would suffer. We also expected staffing to become considerably harder.

By focusing on a single process — overnight housekeeping — we aim to achieve both quality and efficiency.

As a small local hotel in Bupyeong, Hotel AMY hopes to offer guests rest and recovery through local culture and the experience of staying.