The Swedish furniture retailer, famous for its simple, affordable designs have plans to extend their brand into hotels. IKEA now has plans to build a budget hotel chain across Europe.
Their plans include 100 hotels which will surprisingly not feature IKEA's well-known furniture seen in dorm rooms around the country. The rooms are said to be stylish yet affordable and created with both leisure travelers and business people alike.
Ikea's first hotel will mostly open in Germany. The IKEA brand name will not be used for the hotels which will be run by a hotelier. "We will announce within weeks the first location for our budget hotel in Germany and are in talks with hotel operators to rapidly implement our concept," Harald Müller, a project manager at Inter Ikea, said to the German paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
With IKEA being a worldwide name, they hope to open hotels in countries that they have a market in such as the Netherlands, the UK and Poland as well as braking into newer regions for them such as Germany.
A project expert has quoted the value of the project to be at 1 billion euros to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
In 2007, IKEA Norway opened a hostel in an IKEA store where customers could sleep if they hadn't finished shopping by closing time. For one week, customers were allowed to spend the night in an Oslo Ikea warehouse for free. Other IKEA additions include their temporary lounge set up in Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport in July where travelers could rest their feet on comfortable couches in a home-like atmosphere.
In addition to this IKEA announced that they would also be building a self-contained neighborhood in London's East End.
