Niche travel

We’ve had pop-up shops, pop-up restaurants and, of course, pop-up books for years. Now, however, the trend is for a much more ambitious enterprise: the pop-up hotel.

DesignHotels.com, the uber- (it's okay, it's German) trendy marketing network of about 200 independently owned hotels worldwide, opened its first pop-up hotel in December.

The Papaya Playa Project, in Tulum on the Mayan Riviera in Mexico, is made up of 85 refurbished cabanas along 900 metres of Caribbean coast.

As the website puts it, it is “a communal playground offering a raw, white canvas for a community seeking reconnection with nature and within themselves”. Or, as a New York Times correspondent put it, it’s “a spiffed-up campus of cabanas once belonging to three now-shuttered resorts on about a half mile of beachfront land”.

It must work at some level, though, because DesignHotels.comhas just opened a second pop-up hotel, the San Giorgio Mykonos, on the Greek island of the same name.

Situated on the quiet, south side of the island, between Mykonos’s famous Paradise and Paranga beaches, it is, again according to the website, not like staying at a regular hotel, “but like visiting the summer home of your coolest friend”, albeit a friend who charges you a cool €260 a night for a room.

Interestingly, while DesignHotels.cominitially said Papaya Playa would close in May 2012, you can book a one-bed ocean-front cabana from its website (for $678.30, or around €542) for a week in July. Presumably at some stage, by definition, a pop-up hotel becomes just a hotel.

[ designhotels.com ]