Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Goldfish for hire at Travelodge ... sounds fishy!

clipping from page 52 of Business Travel World, June 2007 edition about Travelodge's goldfish hire trial

Late Spring 2007, Travelodge started a trial goldfish hire service in a two of its hotels in Leeds and Birmingham, citing research it sponsored that suggested

"63% of the nation is sleep deprived due to stress and 58% claimed watching goldfish could be the answer".

So jittery customers were allowed to request a fish therapy room at check-in for no extra cost, and then proceed to watch the goldfish for a de-stressing 15 minutes before shutting their eyelids for the night.

Clearing out some old trade magazines, I stumbled across this on the back page of teh June 2007 Business Travel World - not quite sure how I got on that mailing list, but it's full of wierd and wonderful ideas about travel.

Not sure how the trial went - maybe someone from Travelodge's PR team would like to leave a comment! But it's a novel idea from the budget hotel chain that doesn't provide shampoo or hair-dryers in its rooms, and could barely ever keep a lift working in its London Liverpool Street branch.

Travelodge goldfish hire therapy trial

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Reckon that's a gimmick? Or the CEO is a Believer :-)

Coke_Shy_Hero said...

Is Hans Snook involved here somewhere? He may have left Orange, but I believe his goldfish survive him... Hurray for fish!

Anonymous said...

Travelodge are such media whores that almost every holiday and hotel related survey results that appear on the news are paid for by them - I think they feel that unless they're constantly in the news their business will mysteriously collapse. Quite funny really. I'm sure the goldfish stunt was another such scheme, and never went any further.

Alan in Belfast (Alan Meban) said...

Mr Self - I'd tend to agree. And the silence from my email to Travelodge's press office adds to the certainty that it was a column-inch-grabbing stunt.

Funny though, two doors had a goldfish on the counter on Friday night! But I had my back to it, so I didn't get the benefit of fifteen minute's staring.

Anonymous said...

you know someone is gonna do a dump in one