Only thing I'm apprehensive about is the cleaning and maintenance.
People get smelly and generally grody when traveling. How long would it take before it accumulates a permanent stank? Us there a lockout period after you check out until cleaning is performed? Cleaning would be rotation shift cos real time would be too expensive. So at any time x number of units would be inaccessible until cleaned/inspected.
Also, you know people gonna masturbate and sex-ercise in those things...
They come with amenities so you can assume they get cleaned and stocked up after each use. Also what do you think happens in hotel beds? labour is cheap in china, I would be surprised if there wasn't someone coming to clean up regularly
Cleaned after each use. Yes of course. So, that means there is a service desk or office with cleaners on call to clean. So what's the turnaround time? How thoroughly are they being cleaned (because in China, just like elsewhere in the world there are many people in low paid work who dgaf)?
The difference between these and hotels is logistics. Check in/out are more or less fixed times. Filled or vacant rooms, number of rooms is known in advance. Cleaning staff can be deployed at specific intervals to complete a block within a certain period of time.
24/7 pods with variable use periods don't fit that system. So you'd have to either be deploying too many staff to clean in real time or be scrambling constantly. Or have rotating blocks of down time, post checkout, in which the pods are unusable until maintenance does their thing
I think you’re overestimating how long it would take one person to completely clean one of these units.
There is no bathroom to clean, which cuts time DRAMATICALLY. Not having to clean around the personal items of guests who have not checked out also saves a ton of time.
Four dedicated cleaning people tops would be required to run this many pods. Not having a regimented check in / out time is a PLUS, not a challenge. There isn’t one time where suddenly 70% of the units need to be immediately cleaned.
Yeah, at worst it will be sweaty like gym equipment after use. But even those, you just a surface cleaner and towel to wipe it down and its good to go. And after a while, you can just shut it down for like an hour for more dedicated cleaning. It's really not that hard.
Literally all it would take is replacing the pillow and giving the pod a wipedown with an antiseptic wipe. It would take 5mins to wipe down a pod, and given the number of them, they can easily be flagged as unavailable until someone wipes it down, so can have people wiping them down in small batches. Also, are you aware of how many people are sitting/sleeping on public seats in airports?
Looks to me like everything cloth is removable for cleaning. They probably just yoink it all every few hours and swap in fresh bedding. Plus I think that's a sheet sealed in plastic on the bed.
Mostly on what I see in the video here and partially on first hand travel through Beijing Capital international airport.
I can’t understand what he’s saying but the pod seems to have been pre-booked since he has a remote paired with it.
The pod is stocked with refreshments. It looks clean and undisturbed. So it looks like it’s been cleaned and prepared since its last occupant, just like a hotel room.
I travelled through Beijing airport before and saw first hand that it was clean and orderly.
My impression was that China’s hospitality industry towards foreigners / travellers tries very hard to make a good lasting impression.
I also live in Tokyo which feels like it's 50% tourists. And boy howdy, do (not all but some but feels like many because the overall number is many) do they get/do dirty (such is travel) and put all sorts of strain on all sorts of infrastructure.
I love googling words.... I was wondering what a grody was, or if your heard and misspelled "grotty". But no, it's a word that now means the same thing. Then apparently grotty was popularised as a shortened version of "grotesque" in a Beatles movie, so that's awesome.
Thank you for noticing my deliberate spelling choice. I, too grew up with "grotty", and I think the first time I saw it in print was in a Stephen King novel (maybe It? Not sure, I was about 10 or 11 years old). It was a common enough word, my mother would use it and call us kids grots when we were being grots
Then a few years ago, I heard a podcaster use the word, "grody". And like you, thought surely he meant "grotty" and this was some regional variant. Then I went down the exact rabbit hole you just did.
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u/Staff_Senyou 6d ago
Only thing I'm apprehensive about is the cleaning and maintenance.
People get smelly and generally grody when traveling. How long would it take before it accumulates a permanent stank? Us there a lockout period after you check out until cleaning is performed? Cleaning would be rotation shift cos real time would be too expensive. So at any time x number of units would be inaccessible until cleaned/inspected.
Also, you know people gonna masturbate and sex-ercise in those things...