The term “short stay apartments” can be rather confusing. It is not to be confused with the idea of short stays for hotels and other residential hospitality venues, which normally view stays of more than 14 days as over the odds. In the world of the serviced apartment, where the bulk of traffic is mid to long term business, “short stay” really refers to any apartment where the occupant may stay for less than six months: the normal amount of time served on an apartment lease.
The use of short stay apartments by businesses is undertaken for a number of reasons. Commonly, a business may choose to put its employees up in a serviced apartment rather than in a hotel once the length of their trip exceeds a few days. At this point, the benefits of hotel living begin to pall: and the costs of hotel living begin to exert an unwelcome influence on the company`s bank accounts.
For short term business trips of just a few days, an hotel is an ideal location. At this length of time, all attention is theoretically focused on work: meaning that the employee or employees neither have nor want time to themselves. Eating is done as a matter of convenience, or as extensions of the business related nature of the trip.
In circumstances like this, eating in hotel restaurants or going out to eat is all part of the natural order of things. It is both convenient and a good place in which to knock up contracts or digest, with a team, the events of a training day.
Longer term, though, the hotel restaurant becomes an inconvenience. Where a team is staying in the same place for a week or two, dressing and going down for dinner at specified times, often to eat from the same menu, can become quite depressing – and of course a depressed employee is not an employee likely to be putting in her or his best work.
Essentially, the switch from short stays in hotels to longer stays in short stay apartments happens when the convenience of hotel living becomes inconvenient – and when the comforts of a homely surrounding become more important.
It is impossible and impractical for anyone to maintain a hotel living lifestyle indefinitely, unless he or she is of a very specific temperament: everyone needs a space in which he or she can genuinely relax. Without it, longer term good business becomes shabby.
Cooking your own food is one of the key differences between living in a hotel and living in short stay apartments. It is also one of the key benchmarks by which the average person measures his or her access to a comforting environment.
There are two reasons for this – first, because he or she is then able to consume the food that makes him or her happy and healthy; and second, because he or she is able to do this at a time that suits him or her, and in clothes that he or she feels comfortable wearing.