The Check Out Suite at Hotel Bellora in Gothenburg, Sweden doesn’t have a set room rate—and they’re way more interested in your social media habits than your wallet.
Your room rate completely depends on the amount of time you spend surfing your social channels during your stay. Muster the willpower to stay social-free for the entirety of your stay and you’ve got yourself a free room. The most interesting part of this entire suite is how the room knows you’ve been on Instagram.
Inside the suite, there’s a lamp called Skärmfri. This little table lamp jumps into action when a guest signs onto the room WiFi connection, tracking how much time is spent on YouTube, SnapChat, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. For the first 30 minutes, the lamp shines a white light. Once you hit 30 minutes, it turns red.
You’ll never be charged more than the actual room rate, but once that lamp switches from white to red, the rate starts increasing from $0. Hotel Bellora teamed up with Länsförsäkringar (say that 10 times fast), an insurance company aimed at promoting digital health and social sustainability for this feature. “We’re now taking our ‘Screen Help’ concept further in different ways,” said Länsförsäkringar head of communications Lisa Höglund. “The Skärmfri lamp was one way to help, but now we have taken it even further and converted screen time into a currency that rewards a healthy digital life.”
Sounds like the perfect hotel to bring kids—or adults—who spend a little too much time hunched over their devices. For more information on The Check Out Suite, head to the Hotel Bellora website. Or, if you don’t speak Swedish, you can check out more on the suite on Hotel Designs.
