Hotels That Hit the Road

First there were pop-up boutiques, with their short-term leases injecting new life into vacant storefronts. Then came pop-up restaurants, as itinerant chefs began borrowing the kitchens of their vacationing comrades. But, oddly enough, it is the hotel industry that is taking the here-today-gone-tomorrow concept to a new extreme. To coincide with the Summer Olympics, England’s Snoozebox is erecting a temporary 320-room hotel out of shipping containers in a park 90 minutes northeast of London. Each room comes with a bathroom, an air-conditioning unit, a key card and wi-fi access, and the whole hotel can be assembled–and ready for guests to check in–within three to four days of arriving at a new location.

Snoozebox, which rents its rooms for $100 to $300 a night and was valued at nearly $35 million on the London Stock Exchange in May, installed a similar pop-up on the grounds of Windsor Castle for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and in August it will move on to the Edinburgh International Festival. The company’s rivals are relocating for concerts and car races, with some, including the Pop-Up Hotel, based in Somerset, England, modeling their custom-designed canvas tents after those you might find on luxury safaris. Across the pond in California, Shelter Co. this spring began offering offbeat brides–and anyone else looking to have an elegant soire in the woods–tents outfitted with 400-thread-count sheets, down comforters, coolers of wine and prices on a par with the Four Seasons’. Weekend rates begin at $750.

Snoozebox and its lower-impact brethren provide truly portable lodging. But another pop-up purveyor is doing something sneakier: renting out existing hotels, stocking them with organic bath products and maybe some new throw cushions and then jacking up the prices. That’s essentially what Berlin-based Design Hotels did in May when it took over the San Giorgio Beach Hotel on the Greek island of Mykonos for this year’s high season. To spruce up the beachfront property, which was built in the 1990s and is a few hundred yards from a big nightclub, decorators brought in wicker chandeliers, director’s chairs and sea-grass rugs and renamed the place San Giorgio Mykonos.

“You can spin hotels around that have great bones but are getting really tired,” says Design Hotels CEO Claus Sendlinger, whose company’s 231 hotels include the prestigious Gramercy Park Hotel in New York City and the Dolder Grand in Zurich. The website for the revamped San Giorgio has pictures of straw hats slung over chair backs and emphasizes the hotel’s ability to help travelers with “relaxing from their daily life and just being themselves.” “Through the images we use and the language we use, it attracts the creative class,” says Sendlinger. (And by “creative class,” he means people who are willing to rough it for $189 a night.)

Design Hotels’ first pop-up experiment, in Tulum, Mexico, took over the 15-year-old Cabanas Copal last December. For six-months, the company renamed the Copal’s 85 cabanas the Papaya Playa Project, talked up its “panfried” fish and locally grown aloe vera and raised room prices from an average of $60 per night to $100. During a weeklong stay in January, Kevin Gallagher, a Web designer from Langhorne, Pa., who had vacationed at the Copal three times before, was surprised by what he got in return for the higher prices. “One night they brought in a lounge singer from Berlin, sort of cabaret meets Burning Man,” he says. “But as far as the basics, some of it was lacking.” There was only one sun bed on the beach and a few stray umbrellas, so he and his wife parked themselves on towels. Also absent was the Copal’s customary roving waiter to take drink orders.

So when Gallagher got home, he logged on to a travel site and warned prospective visitors about the minimalist makeover. “At first we thought somehow the cabanas were bigger,” he wrote on the site. “Then it hit us. There were no chairs or tables.” Eventually he and his wife figured out the beds were smaller too.

That’s where the key difference between a pop-up hotel and a temporary boutique comes in. “For a pop-up store, you’re there for an hour,” says Julie Sturgeon, a travel agent in Indianapolis. “With a pop-up hotel, you’re there for 24 hours or more, so customers have time to be critical.”

Then again, if a pop-up flops because of problems with the marketing materials or customer service, everything can be rebranded with minimal effort. That’s exactly what Design Hotels is getting ready to do. In September it will rent out the Copal again, this time for a seven-week stint as a yoga retreat. At least with its newest name, PopUp Ashram, the guests won’t be expecting anything posh.