HotelTonight or Expedia may be able to get you a room in a Hilton or Westin at the last minute, but if you're looking for a more upscale experience at a decent price, you'd be hard-pressed to find a good selection of hotels. Now there's a new app called One Night which may be the solution to that problem.
The app was created by Standard International, the owners of The Standard hotels and makers of One Night Standard, a same-day booking app that lets you snag a room in any of The Standard's New York (East Village location pictured above), Los Angeles, or Miami locations. One Night, which offers a slightly broader selection of properties, is the first booking platform built by a luxury hotel — or any hotel, for that matter. The same general rules apply: rooms can only be booked after 3PM on the same day, and will be available at a discounted rate. But just about everything else has been altered.
When you select a city to browse for hotels, the price isn't plainly displayed. The company says it wants users to choose a hotel based on the experience it may provide over cost, and it's probably true that luxury hotel customers aren't as price-sensitive as everyone else. Still, prices are listed — you can check them by swiping left on a hotel. One Night also offers an hour-by-hour "experience guide" that will show you things to do in your hotel and the corresponding neighborhood.
One Night is launching with a small selection of hotels in New York and Los Angeles. You won't find any major hotel chains in the app — a purposeful decision, Standard International CEO Amar Lalvani tells The Verge. "These hotels are all based on the experiences that are created at the hotels. That’s how we picked the hotels," Lalvani says. "Hotel experiences get reduced down to a single picture and price on apps like Expedia and HotelTonight," he continues. "The idea that we spend all that time and energy creating those experiences but those aren't displayed in a beautiful fashion, from a hotel’s perspective that’s very frustrating."
The initial hotels you'll be able to book in One Night are 1 Hotel Central Park, 11 Howard, Gramercy Park Hotel, The Ludlow Hotel, The NoMad Hotel, Calamigos Guest Ranch & Beach Club, Casa Laguna Hotel & Spa, Oceana Beach Club Hotel, Palihotel Melrose, Palihouse Santa Monica, Palihouse West Hollywood, Petit Ermitage, The Redbury Hollywood, Refinery Hotel, SIXTY Beverly Hills, SIXTY SoHo, Sparrows Lodge, The Standard, High Line, The Standard, Hollywood, The Carlyle, The Line, The Wythe, Urban Cowboy, Viceroy Central Park, and the Viceroy L’Ermitage.
"We created this from a hotel’s perspective."
One Night will also share customer data with the hotels, something that its competitors have been reluctant to do. Lalvani told me data from One Night Standard showed that 60 percent of its user base was local, and he expects that to be similar for One Night, which could open up a new base of customers to hotels they may not have heard about or considered before.
Although it is only showcasing hotels in New York and Los Angeles now, One Night will expand to Austin, Chicago, Las Vegas, Miami, and San Francisco over the next year. You can download One Night today from the App Store and the Google Play Store.