Welcome to the hotel. We'll show you to your charger.
Increasingly, accommodation enterprises are catering to EV users.
(A native of England, Matthew Diebel is a veteran journalist who has worked at NBC News, Time, USA Today and News Corp., among other organizations. Having spent his childhood next to one of the world's fastest bodies of water, he is particularly interested in tidal energy.)
A bed. A shower. Maybe a pool and perhaps a nice breakfast.
And, increasingly, an EV charging station.
That’s what’s happening more and more at hotels and vacation rentals as electric vehicles gain market share and become central to vacation and business travel.
Some hotels, reports NerdWallet, are marketing specifically to owners of electric vehicles. At the Hyatt (H) Place Portland-Old Port in Maine, for example, guests can use charging stations that are compatible with Teslas (TSLA) and other EVs at no additional cost beyond the parking fee levied on all vehicles.
And Element Hotels, which is part of the Marriott (MAR) Bonvoy portfolio and has 87 properties across the U.S., has made EV chargers a brand standard, with every Element property required to have at least two charging stations. A spokesperson for Marriott told NerdWallet that most hotels typically install both a traditional and Tesla hookup. Guests can charge their cars for free at most Element Hotels — many of which also have free parking — for up to eight consecutive hours.
Meanwhile, hotel booking sites, like Hilton’s (HLT), are increasingly adding filters enabling users to find lodging with charging stations. In addition, accommodation agencies such as Expedia (EXPE) and Airbnb (ABNB) now featuring listings where EV top-ups can take place, with Airbnb saying it now has more than 850,000 listings on its site that offer an EV charger as an amenity. The company adds that the number of searches by guests for EV chargers doubled between June and December of last year, totaling over half a million unique searches by the end of the year.
What’s next? Possibly having to book your charger time. With most operated on a first-come, first-served basis, busy charging stations, reports NerdWallet, have led to an uptick in negative reviews for hotels that offer EV top-ups as an amenity. Guests say they feel lured in by the benefit, only to find that the charging stations are already being used by other guests.
Sounds a bit like the typical chase for lounge chairs around the hotel pool.