Business plan 2

[pozorvlak]

A Japanese-style coffin hotel, with really good soundproofing, somewhere central in Edinburgh during the Festival, open 24 hours a day, with beds rentable by the hour. Imagine: you're a performer, your show's just finished, leaving you physically and mentally drained, and it's only 10am/midday/3pm/5pm/11pm/1am/whenever. Later on, you've got shows to see and flyering to do, but right now you just need a lie-down and a quick nap. But (because it's the Festival, and accommodation is in short supply) it would take the best part of an hour to walk home, and by the time you got there you'd have to start walking back into town...

Better yet, a coffin hotel in a shipping container, that could be towed around the place to similar events and set up with minimal fuss. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that you could fit 12 standard-size coffin beds into a 20ft shipping container (or 24 into a 40ft one): my years at boarding school suggest we could probably up the density a bit without too much trouble. Annoyingly, shipping containers are only 2.5m wide, so we'd have to take the whole side off to allow access rather than just running a corridor down it if we want the beds to be 2m long.

Ventilation and laundry would be problems, but someone somewhere has already solved those problems, I'm betting...

Comments

[steerpikelet.livejournal.com]

pozorvlak, you are strange and lovely.
That is all.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Thank you :-)

[terpsichore1980.livejournal.com]

One question - where would you put a shipping container in central Edinburgh?

[totherme.livejournal.com]

I'd hang it from a zeppelin.

[terpsichore1980.livejournal.com]

You would!

It would need a very long ladder to the ground somewhere!

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

I was thinking Grassmarket. Possibly the Meadows, if they'd let me. Teviot Square. Scouting suitable sites would be part of the preliminary feasibility stages, obviously :-)

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Also George Square Gardens.

[firefliesinjune.livejournal.com]

You could just put the hotel in the back of a semi, bunkbed style. Then you could drive it around to wherever it needed to be, and at the end of the day you could just spray down all the plastic mattresses. Brilliant!

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

I like it, even lower maintenance than what I had in mind.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

I mentioned the idea to benparker, who was very enthusiastic, but suggested I use a double-decker bus instead. And by an odd coincidence, he has one for sale...

[firefliesinjune.livejournal.com]

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<Mr. Burns> Excellent </Mr. Burns>

[bdunbar.livejournal.com]

A by-the-hour hotel with soundproofing? You're going to get some underage kids there, snogging.

This may or may not be a big deal but with drinking, drugs, underage kids ... better retain a good lawyer.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

The underage kids have already got plenty of places to snog and take drugs, and legal friends assure me that the UK's a lot less litigious than commonly believed. But it's worth bearing in mind - thanks!

[atreic.livejournal.com]

That's a great idea.

[stronglight.livejournal.com]

A way to make the next voles bus pay for itself, perhaps?? :-)

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Did you not note that I already solved this problem? For the bargain price of a fiver, I got about an hour's sleep in a darkened room. Admittedly I was sitting rather than lying, and some sackcloth-clad types were doing something dodgy on stage a few feet from me, but I had a really very good nap.

Not that your idea is bad - indeed there could be a market for it in lots of places - music festivals, central London during the tourist season (and for the Olympics), etc