New hourly cut price hotel service to be launched

Illustrative photo: hin255 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A successful French start-up called Dayuse, which sells hotel rooms with cut-price rates by the hour, is set to be launched in the Czech Republic in January, the daily Hospodářské noviny wrote on Friday.

Illustrative photo: hin255
The online booking service allows customers to book a hotel room during daytime hours without having to pay a full day’s rate and without questioning their intentions. It caters to businessmen on a layover between flights, travellers in need of a quick nap and a shower or anyone looking for a quiet place away from the public.

A similar service, offered by the Spanish on-line platform ByHours.com, which allows the customer to choose their hotel check-in and check-out time, and book the hours they need, was already been launched in the Czech Republic this year.

At the moment there are two Prague-based hotels offering their rooms on the ByHours’s Website. One of them is Hotel 987, situated close to Prague’s main train station.

The owner, Nadia Nekorancová, has been offering her rooms on ByHours since November 2016. According to the daily Hospodářské noviny, she has sold 10 rooms in this way so far.

“The concept is relatively new in the Czech Republic and so far, we haven’t registered that much interest,” she told the daily.

But according to Hospdářské noviny, interest in the online booking service could grow in the future with the launch of the similar, but considerably larger, Dayuse service.

The successful start-up, which was established in 2012 in France, allows users to book rooms for as little as two hours.

According to Hospodářské noviny, Dayuse offers rooms at daytime rates that are up to 75 percent cheaper than the full price.

To this day, the website offers around 3,000 hotels in 16 countries around the world, 600 of them in Paris.

At the time of a growing competition from Airbnb and other home-and flat renting sites, services such as Dayuse or ByHour help hotel owners to attract new customers and increase their income.

According to Hospodářské noviny, French hotels have lost some 15 percent of income due to Airbnb. The daily also mentions analysis published by the Financial Times, which says Dayuse could substitute at least 10 percent of the losses.