Typically, people stay in a hotel due to two reasons. First, you need a hotel to have a place to crash; second, you want to spend the night in the most relaxing and comfortable way possible.
Unfortunately, not everyone can have access to hotel services. This is the main reason why a specific hotel in Japan offers an all-time price of $1 for a day of stay in their hotel. Sounds too good to be true? Not after I tell you why it is cheap and what you must do to avail of this service.
Livestream Your Stay in a Hotel
On a featured story on CNN, a Japanese hotel owner named Tetsuya Inoue shared his idea of attracting more customers in his humble hotel named Asahi Royokan. He lowered his pricing per stay in the hotel as low as $1 or 100 yen. With this low amount, Inoue will not make a fortune out of his business. There goes his idea of Internet revenue.
"Our hotel is on the cheaper side, so we need some added value, something special that everyone will talk about," said Inoue.
Why not use the Internet and live-streamed customers staying in the hotel?
Admittedly, it sounds creepy and scary. But Inoue reassures his customers that live streaming their stay in the hotel only promotes its facilities and nothing lewd.
With his Youtube account named One Dollar Hotel, you may watch strangers use Inoue's hotel for a day.
To protect his customers, he even posted signage in the hotel explaining that they cannot do any lewd acts inside the rooms and that cameras are out-of-range from the bathrooms.
He also reminded his customers to not post any of their confidential information, such as passports and identifications.
Inoue admits that most of his customers find his hotel as weird since cameras are all over the place. But he also explained that some people do not care anymore when other people are watching them.
"Young people nowadays don't care much about privacy. Some of them say it's OK to be [watched] for just one day," adds Inoue.
With the unique but brilliant idea of Inoue, he is now hoping to earn more with his Youtube account that now has more than 1,000 subscribers. Once he reaches 4,000 views, he will be able to put ads on his account wherein he can earn more compared to the payments from his customers.
Livestreaming as Part of Marketing Plan
Though Inoue had a pretty controversial marketing plan for his business, he surely gained a lot of responses. Forbes had the same mindset that live streams can benefit anyone's business and gain a bigger profit on the businessman's end.
According to Forbes, video marketing or what we called now as live streaming, boosts industry and specific business. They described live streaming as "opening the new world of interactivity" perfect, especially for most businesses.
With this said, maybe Inoue's idea is not at all weird but a profitable one dollar idea.
