The concept of an airline’s upper class lounge has been transferred to an affordable new Midtown hotel. Located three blocks west of Times Square, Yotel may make guests feel like they are about to check in for a flight, since the franchise has its roots as a short-stay budget buy at three European airports.
Now the first city center location, with its spare but sleek 669 rooms, is ready to take off in Manhattan in early June
."We use aircraft designers to design the room from an ergonomic point of view," says Yotel CEO Gerard Greene. "The idea is to make the space work, to use features such as the moving folding bed, to understand where your luggage goes, to understand where the plug sockets are. To try and work out how to get a luxurious bathroom in a small space."
Besides super-charged free WiFi, other tech-y features include "club cabins," meeting rooms that can be rented by the hour, a restaurant with tables that disappear into the floor after hours and an attention getting “Yobot” -- a massive robotic arm in the lobby that mechanically stores guests' luggage.
"What we’re trying to do is to bring robotics, and much the same as the check-in kiosks were only used by the airline staff, now they’ve brought it out front for the customers," says Greene. "And the same thing with this robotics, is it's using robotics and technology and making it accessible to everybody."
Standard rooms go for $149 a night through September 5, but Yotel's Facebook friends can acquire a rock-bottom rate during the first week of June.
