Hotel Owner Hotel Owner July 2017 digital | Page 48

QUALITY IN TOURISM | WHEN AN INSPECTOR CALLS
year to meet the demands and requests of
guests from the previous year, as well as
ensuring we have an innovative, interesting
and ever-changing theme and style to
keep the guests engaged. Two years ago,
our communal areas sported a shabby
chic style, while this year the focus was
a modern club / Ibiza vibe. This worked
particularly well with our improved pool and
treatment area, where the guests can also
get massages and treatments.”
The Pop-Up Hotel is also diversifying
this year, expanding to cover key sporting
events. There is demand for quality
accommodation at horse racing and motor
racing events, and while canvass tents are a
popular style for festivals, something else is
needed for sports enthusiasts. In response,
the team has created a more traditional
different world. Your brain is telling you to
Owner Mark Sorrill feels that standards
expect some posh tents at a Festival, while within the industry are essential and that
your eyes are telling you this is so much working alongside professional bodies
more. The accommodation itself is like a including the grading schemes and UK
little village, comprising everything from Festival Associations helps to assure
individual pop-up rooms to yurts and gypsy standards, and also assure customers. He
caravans, vintage airstreams to an actual firmly believes that the UK is at the forefront
rental cottage; all are available to hire for of luxury, pop-ups and glamping, both in
the Festival duration and they have so terms of the calibre, variety and quality
much more than you’d expect from a pop-up of their availability and the demand from
spa to sofas, proper beds and plenty of consumers, and that we can continue to
tables and chairs. In fact, if you weren’t told lead from the front with the right investment
you were in a temporary tented structure, by hospitality businesses.
you’d be hard pressed to realise from the
interior furnishings.”
Speaking of Glastonbury, Mark
comments “We adapt the pop-up every
style hotel room with solid walls, which is still
very light and easy to transport and just like
the tents.
One final advantage that Mark and
the team capitalise on is their relative size.
Mark comments “We are a small enterprise
when compared to large hotel chains, and
our non-fixed status means that we are
nimble enough to be able to change quickly
and adapt to the ever changing consumer
wants, needs and expectations. This means
we don’t have to spend big bucks upgrading
hotel bedrooms only to realise that they
are out of date a few years later, yet we are
still able to cater for hundreds. This year we
hosted around 1,800 at Glastonbury.”
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www.hotelowner.co.uk
July 2017