Site’s unique stays include castle, lighthouse.
Will travelers want to stay in a castle in Kentucky, a former jail in New Orleans or a lighthouse in Massachusetts?
Booking.com, an accommodation booking site with a database of more than 1.5 million properties, is betting the answer is “yes.”
The three are part of the site’s Book It List, which is a collection of not-so-common places around the United States where guests can hang their hat for a night or more; the list has one option in each state.
The company introduced this category by selling one-night stays early this month: a suite on the 80th floor of the Empire State Building, a suite at the American Airlines Arena in Miami and in Los Angeles on a tour bus that the musician Nick Jonas helped design.
Those were one-time bookings, but the regular offerings on the Book It List include a man-made cave in New Mexico, a treehouse in Ohio, a base camp in Alaska and a shrimp boat in South Carolina.
The list’s properties are in diverse locales: major cities, the mountains, coastal spots and the remote countryside.
It costs $65 a night to stay at the 12-room Town Hall Inn in Lead, S.D. Originally constructed in 1912 as Lead’s town hall, the building was used for several purposes, including the mayor’s and treasurer’s office, a jail and judge’s chambers.
The gallows was directly behind the building.
On the other end of the spectrum, there’s a centuryold family farm in Dyersville, Iowa, where the movie “Field of Dreams” was filmed.
Tours of the property have been offered for several years, but travelers who are willing to pay $2,200 will be able to spend the night in the farmhouse’s upstairs bedroom.
Pepijn Rijvers, the chief marketing officer for Booking. com, said that the company introduced this list after noticing that an increasing number of its customers were reserving stays through the site at independently owned small hotels and nontraditional properties such as yurts and treehouses.
“We were getting more bookings for accommodations that were perceived to be different or unusual than we were for the big chain hotels,” he said.
The company did a formal survey, and the results confirmed the trend.
From a pool of 56,272 respondents, 22 percent of U.S. residents and 37 percent of people living in other countries reported that they intended to stay in a unique location like a castle or treehouse in 2018.
Incidentally, Airbnb’s 2018 Travel Trends report also found that an increasing number of travelers were booking stays in nontraditional accommodations like yurts and ryokans.
Rijvers said Booking.com relied on more than 400 of its employees in the United States to find the properties for the list and that it is intended to get Americans excited about traveling within the country.
“We’re hoping that we’re enticing people who live in the U.S. to visit new destinations because of these unusual properties,” he said.
This new list may be a clever marketing tool, but it’s a useful one, according to Bjorn Hanson, a professor at the Tisch Center for Hospitality at New York University.
In his research on the factors that motivate travelers when they choose their accommodations, he found that while location, price and loyalty programs figure in, so does a property’s Instagram potential.
“Travelers, more than ever before, want to be able to brag to their family and friends about the cool place they stayed in that few others have,” Hanson said. This new list, he added, definitely qualifies.