ANALYSIS – Extended stay: Why it’s time to offer your travellers serviced apartments and aparthotels

Hotels can be glamorous places to stay: guests from around the world, lavish breakfasts, the buzz of the lobby. But for business travellers staying more than a few nights the attraction can soon diminish. Many would rather have a bigger space, the opportunity to make their own food and generally  somewhere that feels a little more like home.

That wish is becoming more common, because business trips are becoming fewer in number but longer in duration. According to the most recent figures from card issuer AirPlus International, the average length of a business trip rose from 5.4 days in 2019 to 6.1 days in 2024, and no fewer than 21 per cent of intercontinental trips were for 14 days or more.

It is to meet exactly this kind of need that the extended stay accommodation sector continues to grow, representing eight per cent of all guest accommodation (including hotels and Airbnb) in Europe’s 26 leading gateway cities, said a report published last month by the property advisor Savills.

Employees staying in serviced apartments and aparthotels (which have hotel-type facilities such as restaurants) benefit in many ways. They enjoy on average 30 per cent more space than in a hotel room, according to serviced apartment provider Silver Door. They also usually have kitchen facilities and often a washing machine, plus separate areas in which to sleep, work and relax. As a result, guests can lock into a more normal routine, boosting both wellbeing and productivity.

Extended stay benefits employers too: for stays of a week or more, rates are often cheaper than hotels. And if the worker cooks for themselves or orders a take-out meal, that is usually less expensive than dining in a restaurant every evening.

However, there can be challenges to incorporating extended stay options into a managed travel programme. The biggest problem is that they are not always available on online booking tools used to book regular hotels. Invoicing and payment can also be more complicated.

This is not an easy problem to fix because extended stay providers use different property management and reservations technology from other travel suppliers, but the situation has improved notably over the past few years. Some of the most advanced suppliers offer applied programming interfaces that pipes their inventory into booking tools to be compared alongside regular hotels in accommodation searches.

But there is a strong argument in any case that booking extended stay properties should not be performed with a couple of clicks. If a business traveller books a hotel for a couple of nights and doesn’t like the place very much when they check in, no great harm is done because it is such a short stay. But if a company working on a large infrastructure project puts 100 people into a serviced apartment building for six months and they are all unhappy, there could be a much bigger problem. It is therefore worth checking the property carefully before booking, ideally with a site visit, or by taking the advice of a trusted specialist serviced apartment provider.    

With such a large number of room nights involved, it is also important to plan well ahead to ensure your company’s rooming requirements can be met. There are times when supply of extended stay accommodation can be very stretched.

An obvious example will be in North America this summer during the FIFA World Cup. But, said Silver Door in a recent market report, there are less obvious demand pinch points that need careful research, such as the current boom in the building of data centres. “Up to 1,000 project workers could be contracted for the 18–30-month construction,” said Silver Door. “This is positive for centres being built near towns and cities where stock already exists, but sourcing temporary housing solutions near remote sites will continue to prove challenging.”