Hotels Two new pod hotel concepts have arrived in New York, the Yotel concept of Simon Woodroffe and the Pod 51/39 hotels. Both play on the image of the Japanese pod hotels, though in form they differ. The hotels in New York offer very small rooms, rather than actual capsules as one might find in Tokyo. This is a necessary adaptation, and serves to solve a couple of problems in the New York City hotel market (and other major urban hotel markets).

Both hotel chains offer small hotel rooms, which are a solution to the problem that conventional hotel rooms face. A conventional hotel room, being larger than the pods, comes at a higher cost because of the higher square footage. For many travelers, this cost is not justified, particularly in a city like New York where a hotel room might be little more than a place to sleep, shower and store one's luggage. The two concepts are seeking a way of capturing the market for people who do not view the hotel room as anything more than functional.

The Full Pod at Pod 39 runs $225 per night, and at Pod 51 it is the same. A premium cabin at the Yotel is $179. These prices are not particularly low, but they are low compared with conventional hotels in Manhattan. Both hotels have adopted young, hip, modern styling and amenities in an attempt to provide offerings for the clients that in some ways make up for the tiny rooms. Thus, both hotels focus on their dining and entertainment options....

The Yotel has a robot luggage handler, a nod to the robot drink servers at Woodroffe's Yo! Sushi.
Both also promote their modern, efficient designs that allow for a comfortable stay in an otherwise small room, because everything is designed so well.

The concept of the tiny hotel room has been explored before, for example the Rotel Inn in Passau, Bavaria offers similarly tiny rooms at discount prices, but without the modern cool factor. Malaysia's Tune Hotel chain also offers a similar concept in tiny hotel rooms, but with no cool factor, no frills and rock bottom prices. Japan has the longest history of tiny hotel rooms, and is referenced in the Pod name, but Japan's pod hotels are different from the New York Pods and Yotel in some significant ways.

First, Pod and Yotel have actual hotel rooms. In this, they are much more similar Tune or Rotel than to the capsule hotels. The capsules are just that -- a single mattress, in a tube, in a stack. There is no room to speak of, the bathroom is shared, and you cannot stand up. A taller person would not be able to sit up. The capsule hotels and the Pod/Yotel concept do share the common trait of dealing with high hotel prices in dense cities where land is scarce expensive by cutting back on the footprint of the room. But capsules take the concept to the extreme, and ultimately they have a different…