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No Instruction Manual Will Be Needed To Stay At Ikea's New European Budget Hotels

Where: Sweden
August 15, 2012 at 10:38 AM | by | Comments (0)

Though they've dabbled in the real estate business for a while now, internationally-known furniture megastore IKEA is getting ready to dive into the hotel business with a string of 100 "budget design" hotels across Europe—and the first one is scheduled to open in Germany.

The announcement came yesterday, about a week after the company's net worth was revealed to be a staggering €9 billion.

Clearly, they've got the dough to build whatever the heck kind of hotels they want to. But, in the interest of making even more money, the company has decided to focus on the trendy (and lucrative) budget hotel market. And though the hotels will not be branded or operated by the company, IKEA will build, develop and own them.

We assume, of course, that they'll also be supplying all the furniture.

The Financial Times reports:

"Inter Ikea hopes to build the hotels in markets where it is already active in property, such as the UK, Netherlands and Poland, as well as new markets such as Germany.

'We will announce within a few weeks the first location for our budget hotel in Germany and we are in talks with hotel operators to rapidly implement our concept,' Harald Müller, a senior manager in Inter Ikea's property division, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany."

We've joked around before about hotels that skimp out on the furniture by shopping at IKEA, but the concept of an entire IKEA-built hotel has us kind of excited. Thinking back on all the good times we've spent stalking the aisles of IKEA on a Sunday afternoon—and making a pit stop for meatballs in the cafeteria—we wouldn't be at all surprised if we end up really liking the hotels.

But until we start seeing renderings and checking rates, we'll try not to get our hopes up.

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