£20 a night easyHotel opens in central London

While many hotels are offering more and more frills to entice the lucrative and prestigious business travel market, a hotel with a difference has just opened in London. A hotel that offers what could well be some of the smallest room sizes in the industry, with equally small rates to match.

The first easyHotel, which opened in London on Monday, is located at 14 Lexham Gardens, London W8, just off the Cromwell Road between South Kensington and Earls Court. The hotel offers 34 rooms, all with double mattresses and a quilt, en-suite bathrooms with towels, air conditioning and pay-as-you-go television at £5 per 24 hours. There is one disabled room and the group boasts that three of the rooms even have windows. The three rooms with windows sell at a premium to the 30 rooms without windows. The rooms come in three innovative, yet brutally honest sizes - small, very small and tiny - or to be more precise, 80, 70 and 60 square feet respectively. Rates start from £20 per room per night and rise to anywhere around £50 based on a supply and demand basis.

easyHotel room with window	easyHotel room without window
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easyHotel has one member of staff permanently on site but no services other than accommodation and no common or public areas other than a manned reception desk.

The aim of easyHotel is to provide a safe, clean room for the night with an en-suite bathroom, to fill the gap left between branded hotel chains and bed & breakfast accommodation. The existing branded hotel chains all start at a price much higher than easyHotel and bed & breakfast accommodation is an un-branded 'one-off' service where quality and value are variable.

The easyHotel is owned and operated by the easyGroup and future growth is predicted through franchising. The first franchised easyHotel will open in Basel, Switzerland in September 2005, and further franchises are expected in London and around the UK.

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