ANNA HART THE HYPE

After pop-up hotels comes the new breed of luxurious tented retreats in locations such as the salt flats of Bolivia. Happy campers, indeed!

I’ve never been entirely convinced about pop-ups, whether it’s a restaurant, bar or shop. A bit like how I feel about one night stands: if something is really that good, surely we want to keep on doing it? If a pop-up is a genuine success, why is it not a stay-up?

Of course, I understand that pop-ups permit independent designers, chefs and entrepreneurs to experiment and innovate, without the sizeable investment normally required. Two of London’s most exciting young chefs, Isaac McHale and James Lowe, operated a pop-up in the Ten Bells pub and hosted suppers in disused office buildings, before going on to open their respective Michelin-starred restaurants, The Clove Club and Lyle’s. A pop-up can offer proof of concept for a stay-up.

But some pop-ups are born with a death wish, possessing no aspirations to linger on this planet. They are designed specifically to satisfy the most neophiliac urges of the modern consumer. They are pop-ups that manufacture urgency and capitalise on FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out!). They toy with our emotions like a holiday romance. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it helps to know what we’re getting into.

With museums, restaurants and stores in on the pop-up act, travel was the inevitable next dominion. Some pop-up accommodation set-ups are born out of sheer expediency, like The Pop-Up Hotel (thepopuphotel.com), which has been supplying plush tents to festivals like Bestival and Glastonbury for several summers, or Snoozebox (snoozeboxhotel.co.uk), which transformed shipping containers into accommodation pods during the 2012 London Olympics, for example. But over the past two years, a growing number of ultra high-end luxury pop-up hotels, retreats and “experiences” have emerged that have nothing to do with practicality and everything to do with indulgence. Tom Marchant, co-founder of Black Tomato (blacktomato.com/blink), explains that he was inspired to roll out Blink, a customisable luxury tent option, partly by restaurant and bar pop-ups.

“Pop-up hotels and retreats tap into two current travel trends,” says Marchant: “The pop-up scene, and also the demand for truly unique experiences and the bragging rights that come with a holiday nobody else can replicate.”

The Blink service organises far-flung, remote temporary accommodation in parts of the world that travellers wouldn’t necessarily have access to. Guests start by selecting a global region, and Black

Tomato finds a distant piece of land on which to construct bespoke temporary lodgings and build an entire guest experience. Prices stretch from £8,800 per person (based on six travelling) for a three-night Blink experience in Morocco to £23,800 per guest for a Blink experience in Bolivia for six people for four nights.

Amazing Escapes (amazingescapes.ch) offers a similar bespoke tented village service, but more affordable is its roster of pop-up tent hotels across the globe. Every year, Amazing Escapes builds four luxury tented camps in beautiful and inaccessible locations, each pop-up remaining in situ for just three to four months.

There’s a growing feeling that hoteliers and operators have been missing a trick by sticking to the prevailing one-size-fitsall approach to luxury. A study by American Express found that nearly 70 per cent of millennials want “a personalised travel experience” on their holidays, and this is a generation that prioritises travel, according to research. And for the operators themselves, a tented pop-up operation is an agile, responsive business model, allowing entrepreneurs to respond swiftly to trend like current “hotspot” destinations, and

A tented pop-up operation is an agile, responsive business model

even tailor the size of the hotel specifically to demand. Compared with the time, capital and commitment required for a bricks-and-mortar hotel, collapsible tents can be moved on swiftly, and tents added or removed according to demand. Anything that enables hoteliers to innovate is a good thing.

Best of all, the phenomenon of luxury tented camps is that rare thing, a high-end trend that even those on a budget can jump on – by erecting their very own pop-up hotel: a tent.

Anna Hart’s travel memoir,

published by Little, Brown is available for £11.99 from books. telegraph.co.uk

Inside the (deluxe) tent