IFA Hotel Investments president Joe Sita stands in front of the pool and beach at the North Residences of the Fairmont Palm Jumeirah project. IFA Hotel Investments president Joe Sita stands in front of the pool and beach at the North Residences of the Fairmont Palm Jumeirah project.

Target Market
My next question for Sita, naturally, is to ask whether Yotel New York is specifically targeting the short-stay traveller.

“Not necessarily,” he says. “We like to think that we cater for all markets here. But New York is not a long-stay market generally speaking.
This is a transient hotel; we’re located next to the Javits Centre, which is the largest exhibition centre in New York, and we’re the closest hotel of this size, so we’re envisaging a large corporate market that comes in and stays one or two nights.

“We’re also envisaging quite a large European market that might come in and stay three or four nights in New York and we can still accommodate that in terms of two people because there’s plenty of room.

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We’re not in any way trying to discriminate against any of the market segments. We think we’ve got a product that fits all markets and all people,” he asserts.

This brings us to the reason why, when based on his more than 30 years experience in the hotel business, Sita believes that Yotel “represents the future”.

“I think what’s happened is that we’ve gone through phases in the industry where hotels have been very compartmentalised into saying ‘this is either a budget or economy hotel, a four-star or upscale, upper upscale, or luxury hotel’ — we sort of segment the market in this way.
Why I believe this is the future is because this is a product that appeals to all markets,” asserts Sita.

“The way we position Yotel is affordable luxury. So we provide a very high quality product in terms of the fit-out, the ergonomics, the MEP and the LEED certification — typically all of this used to be confined to the more upscale or upper upscale and luxury products where you have space as well as high quality fit out.

“What we’ve done is really combine those things and you can actually have a very high quality product and an exceptional experience in a much smaller space.

And that means that on a value for money basis, bang for buck — whether you’re a developer who’s looking to maximise the amount of product you can build on a particular bit of real estate or you’re a customer looking for better value for money — this is the way of the future.

So in other words, less doesn’t necessarily mean less, less can be more in this case,” he explains.