What is serviced accommodation and how can it make my work trips more enjoyable?
If you travel regularly with your job, then it’s easy to end up living out of your bag and never really settling or unpacking.
Not only can this cause stress and generally affect your mental and physical well-being but it gives that real sense of being temporary wherever you go and something we work hard here at Coppergate Serviced Accommodation to make sure doesn’t happen.
So with that in mind, we have put together 5 of our very best travel tips to help you relax when working away from home.
Serviced Accommodation is NOT…
- An AST or Assured Shorthold Tenancy, where a tenant takes a short or longer term rental of a property and is considered a tenant.
- Hotel accommodation.
- Bed and breakfast.
In a nutshell, Serviced Accommodation is exactly what it says, accommodation where the landlord or property owner provides fully furnished accommodation with additional services, like cleaning and housekeeping and sometimes even more comprehensive facilities, like office and meeting space or coffee shops and gyms.
Depending on the location and market intended to be served, there are a huge range of services that can be offered.
One big but subtle difference between rented accommodation and serviced accommodation is that the customer is considered a ‘guest’ in serviced accommodation, not a tenant.
What’s The Difference Between Serviced Accommodation and a Hotel?
Another good question!
Serviced accommodation is mostly self-contained houses or apartments, where the guest lives in a home-from-home environment and caters for themselves. If the apartment is located within a block or complex, there might be security or a concierge service but there’s no centralised catering or restaurant as such, unless there is a restaurant on-site for the convenience of guests staying there but mostly, guests would cater for themselves.
Where there are similarities to a hotel is in the housekeeping and cleaning services, with linen and towel changes for example but that’s where the similarities start and end.
What Type Of Person Uses Serviced Accommodation?
Typical serviced accommodation customers include travellers, business people and professionals working away from home, families requiring temporary accommodation between house moves or during renovations or insurance repairs after flood or fire damage.
In fact, many businesses block book serviced accommodation when they know they will be placing workers or consultants in locations away from their home, often overseas, recognising the benefits to welllbeing of their workers compared to long term stays in a hotel.
What Are The Benefits Of Serviced Accommodation Over Hotels, Guest Houses Or Shared Accommodation?
- Having your own space to live in, like a home from home, is much more relaxing and less stressful than hotel or shared accommodation.
- There’s usually much more room to spread out and make the place your own.
- There’s more privacy than sharing with others.
- It’s easier to make space to work if that’s a requirement while you’re staying.
- Catering for yourself gives more freedom and choice while still benefiting from the convenience of having housekeeping look after the cleaning and washing of linen, etc.
All in all the above benefits make for a much better living experience, better for the wellbeing and general health of a worker working away from home for periods of time.
What Facilities Can I Expect To Find In Serviced Accommodation?
In reality, facilities vary, just like any other type of accommodation but in good serviced accommodation you can certainly expect to find all the essentials you’d find in a modern home, like fully kitted out kitchen, including cooker, microwave, kettle, toaster, washing machine and probably a dishwasher.
In the lounge area, whether it’s a studio apartment or house, there will of course be a TV and possibly a music system.
But in some higher end accommodation you might also find, smart TV’s, Alexa or Echo style devices, coffee machines and even an initial supply of sustainable consumables and food essentials for guests’ use, which is a always a bonus when you arrive in an unfamiliar place with no idea where the shops are.
Why Is Serviced Accommodation Better Than Staying In A Hotel?
There are a number of reasons we believe that choosing serviced accommodation is better than staying in a hotel:
- In most cases, guests will have much more space to move around and relax in serviced accommodation. Love Exploring found that in general serviced accommodation offers at least 30% more space than most hotels and in many cases, it’s much more than that.
- Serviced Accommodation offers a fully fitted and functioning kitchen, which means you can eat whatever and whenever you like, as opposed to being restricted to hotel meal times or the expensive option of eating out or takeaways every day!
- The privacy and security offered by serviced accommodation goes a long way towards making your stay more relaxed and stress-free, which is a great wellbeing reason to choose this option.
- Another benefit is the ultimate flexibility offered by staying in your own self-contained accommodation, unconstrained by hotel operating hours, meal times and daily room service interruptions.
- Maybe surprisingly too, serviced accommodation is generally less expensive than staying in hotels.
- If you’re concerned with saving the world, as we all should be today, there are many sustainability and environmental benefits connected with serviced accommodation compared to hotel operations, not least the frequency of laundering towels and linen.
- But perhaps the biggest benefit of all is the real home-from-home feeling you get when you stay in good quality serviced accommodation, especially if you’re working away from home for long periods when you can make the space truly yours, relax and enjoy.
What You Get When You Stay With Coppergate Serviced Accommodation
Here at Coppergate Serviced Accommodation, we have a number of different accommodation options available, ranging from 1 and 2 bed apartments, to whole houses in Doncaster, Grimsby and Cleethorpes.
We specialise in serving corporate clients looking for a home-from-home stay while working away and regularly accommodate consultants and engineers working in the petrochemicals and renewables sectors around the Humber region.
We have a sustainable ethos and all our properties are high spec with comprehensive inventories including smart TV’s, coffee machines and a host of additional facilities, with our seven new Coppergate Grimsby apartments due to come available early in 2023.
