Solo travel
In recent years, Taiwan’s hotels have also diversified their looks with an eye to meeting the needs of the more casual and cash-strapped travelers of the current era.
Single Inn, a former sauna located near the Kaohsiung train station, is now a 64-room hotel that sends its male and female guests into separate areas at check-in. The hotel offers only one kind of room, a single with a single bed, enough space to open a large suitcase, and a lockable sliding door for privacy. It also provides Wi-Fi access and a flatscreen TV that requires the use of headphones.
Guests share a sauna-style bathing area, toilet facilities and dressing tables, but the hotel offers amenities, including a screening room, reading room, and restaurant, and the option to arrange massages. It also costs as little as NT$900 per night (including breakfast). Highly regarded by backpackers, it averages 40% occupancy on off-peak days.
Su Peng-chin, a 30-something who runs Single Inn, says that to the older generation, a sauna was a complete leisure facility that integrated bathing, massage, and dining. It was also a convenient place for businesspeople traveling between northern and southern Taiwan to spend the night back when Kaohsiung’s economy was first taking flight.
With the sauna business in decline, he talked his father, who was the original operator of the sauna, and his partners into converting their business into a hotel. Drawing ideas from Korea’s Jjimjilbang (a combination spa, gym, and snack bar popular with young people), foreign youth hostels, and Japanese “capsule” hotels, he developed a unique business model that he hoped would provide travelers “personal freedom without too much isolation.”
A home away from home
One question worth considering is whether an ideal hotel should make guests feel it is their “home away from home,” or rather should offer them new experiences.
Renowned industrial designer Hsieh Jung-ya believes that the international hotel industry has developed a very fixed concept of the hotel as a “home away from home” over the last 100 years. The industry’s core values and its underlying design aesthetic are built around the expectation that a hotel will be as relaxing, comfortable, and reliable as home.
But the global proliferation of “design hotels” over the last 30 years has turned this concept of “hotel as home” on its head. “People go on vacation to experience an ambiance different from that of their homes,” explains Hsieh, “to enrich their lives.”
Yen Chung-hsien argues instead that the industry’s final frontier is “redefining every aspect of your home and your life.” For example, General Hotel Management, a leader in the design hotel segment, delivers a different cultural experience in every country, while also providing guests with the inspiration to create a more delightful, comfortable home.
Perhaps the hotel awaiting you at the end of a day of travel is more a metaphor for home. The very transiency of your relationship with a hotel makes it better suited to the drifting of travel, and ultimately better able to soothe your weary spirit.