What an Aparthotel Changes

A growing share of our bookings are in aparthotels, and they deserve their own note because they are neither of the two things a guest expects them to be. At the front they behave like hotels: a desk, a lift, a numbered door, a keycard. At the back they behave like flats, with a kitchen, a washing machine, and a housekeeping schedule that visits every third day rather than every morning. Each half changes something.

Entry, which is usually easier

Most aparthotels in this city have thinned out their night staffing, which is the point of the format. After ten or eleven the desk is unmanned and entry runs on a street-door code or on your card at the outer door. In practice this makes an arrival simpler than in a full-service hotel, not harder. There is no lobby to cross because there is barely a lobby, and nobody to walk past because there is nobody there.

The one thing it does require is that you know your own building. Guests staying three weeks often could not say what happens at the front door after midnight, because they have never come home after midnight. It is worth checking on the day you book rather than at the moment somebody is standing on the pavement.

Housekeeping on a three-day cycle

This is the half that genuinely changes something, and almost nobody thinks about it. In a hotel, the room is reset every morning by somebody who never speaks to you. In an aparthotel, the room is reset twice a week by somebody who has now been in your space eight times and knows what it usually looks like.

It changes nothing about what we do, because what we do already assumes the room will be read. Every linen is carried in and carried out, towels are her own, oil touches nothing belonging to the building, and furniture is returned to where it stood. But it removes any margin for a guest who was relying on a morning clean to tidy up after an evening. There is no morning clean. The room on Thursday is the room you left on Tuesday, which is an argument for the way we work rather than against the format.

The long stay changes the guest

The real difference is social and it has nothing to do with buildings. A hotel guest is a stranger for two nights and leaves. An aparthotel guest is a resident for three weeks, recognised by the desk, nodded at in the lift, sharing a floor with people who are also there for a month. That is a different relationship to a building, and it is why aparthotel guests ask more careful questions about arrivals than hotel guests do.

The answer is the same answer, applied a little more deliberately. The arrival is a person arriving. She does not wait anywhere, does not stand in a corridor, does not appear twice in an evening. Over a long stay the only thing that would accumulate into a pattern is repetition at a fixed hour, and guests who stay a month and book more than once tend to vary the hour without being told to.

What the kitchen is actually for

Warmth and water, which are the only two things any room has to supply. An aparthotel supplies both well, along with a bathroom that is usually better than a hotel equivalent at the same nightly rate, which matters for the formats that end in a shower.

Beyond that, a kitchen changes the shape of a long booking more than a short one. The eight-hour overnight in an aparthotel has a morning in it that a hotel morning cannot easily reproduce, because nothing arrives on a trolley and nobody has to be out by eleven.

Everything else runs unchanged: the same twenty to thirty minutes across the centre, the same rate at four in the morning as at four in the afternoon, the same settling of payment in the room. The arrival is put together the same way whether the door at the end of it belongs to a hotel or to a serviced flat, and a first oil session reads the same in either.