No longer lewd: Hotels offer day access to rooms, services. Will it catch on in Myrtle Beach?

It’s an intriguing concept, wanting to use a hotel’s amenities without staying overnight — the primary purpose for staying in a hotel at all.

In Myrtle Beach and resort destinations around the world, there is a growing appetite to do just that.

It’s unclear when exactly the trend started — two companies, ResortPass and HotelsByDay, started up in the last seven years or so to meet the growing demand. But parents across the country in Charlotte, Atlanta and more than a dozen other cities have likely seen ads for the Great Wolf Lodge, an indoor waterpark resort and hotel that has offered day passes to access its amenities for decades.

Myrtle Beach doesn’t have a massive waterpark like Great Wolf, but plenty of area hotels do have waterparks of their own, usually with a big pool and a handful of slides and water spouts for children to run through.

The idea behind ResortPass and HotelsByDay is that those amenities are just sitting around under-used. Maybe visitors staying at a hotel are going straight to the beach. Or maybe a hotel’s pool sits empty during the week, when locals with a day off could use it but don’t want to stay the night.

“So this is really a great opportunity for the guests that still want to lay at the pool and have that poolside service — for them to go experience a resort or a hotel for the day,” ResortPass’ marketing director Christina Daly said.

Both ResortPass and HotelsByDay offer access to more than just pools and slides, though. Both of these services allow people to rent a hotel room for a day rather than overnight, demand for which grew rapidly during the pandemic as some people needed to escape work-from-home life and work in quiet for a day or two or seven.

The two largest hotel chains, Hilton and Marriott, also offer day rooms as part of their WorkSpaces and Work Anywhere programs. Both companies kept the programs alive even as the pandemic has waned and have dozens of local hotels available that anyone can book a room at.

For their part, ResortPass and HotelsByDay both face a major challenge in their hope that their services will catch on in the Myrtle Beach area — each service only has a single hotel available to book with in the entire region. With so little capacity right now, a question arises: Will this trend actually catch on in Myrtle Beach?

Who are the customers?

Traditionally, the practice of renting hotel rooms by the day or by the hour comes from somewhat lewd roots dating back a century, with sex workers renting rooms for short periods of time to meet with clients.

HotelsByDay founder Yannis Moati acknowledged this as a possible issue and something that has haunted him since he launched the company. However, he said he and his staff have worked extensively to prevent misuse of HotelsByDay, including requiring credit cards for bookings and maintaining open communication with hotel staff.

“Have we never had it? I would like to say it hasn’t, but there have been less than 10 issues in hundreds of thousands of bookings in which a hotel called to ask us to block a guest and drop them,” Moati said. “We were really scared we are going to attract this type of crowd, but they don’t really use us.”

Those types of customers end up at motels, usually, Moati said.

“Illegitimate romance — because we need to make a separation between legit and not legit — it’s a very good question, and it’s a little bit of a struggle,” he said. “It’s a sexy product, right? It’s sexy. It’s appealing, and people use it. There’s a bed.”

Both ResortPass and HotelsByDay also combat the view that their services could be offering something in poor taste by selling more than just hotel rooms. Both services sell day passes to hotel gyms, pools and waterparks. HotelsByDay also markets the ability for people to even buy access to a hotel garage, for those who want to park there and head to the beach.

Moati said his service is not just for people looking for a place to work or play. HotelsByDay also markets itself, in part, as a service to help people who find themselves stranded after a flight cancellation, delay or a long layover.

“I was a travel agent and saw that there was an increasing amount of customers that wanted flexibility. They flew all day. They wanted a room for a few hours to be able to shower, change, rest,” he said.

The majority of the customers on these services — around 60% — are locals, according to both companies. Frequently, it’s people who have passed by a hotel for years and wanted to take their kids to its pool, or use it as a meeting ground to head to the beach.

“COVID has made very clear that our customers are very local — 60, 62% of them book a hotel that is within 20 miles of where they live, which is usually not a customer that a hotel is accustomed to,” Moati said. “We optimize inventory that they don’t know how to use.”

Local interest

The demand from locals seeking hotel rooms in Myrtle Beach might be there. It’s not uncommon for Grand Stranders to complain on social media about hotels not allowing customers who live within a certain vicinity, such as within the county, to stay with them. Often, these local customers just wanted to use the hotel waterpark or eat at its restaurant.

One Myrtle Beach resident said in a recent Facebook post that he used to visit the Hotel Blues pool bar on vacations before he moved to the Grand Strand. But now that he lives here, he found out that he can’t go to the bar anymore unless he’s staying the night; however, he said the hotel doesn’t rent to locals. A sales representative for Hotel Blue confirmed on Tuesday that the property does not rent rooms to people who live in Horry or Georgetown Counties.

“Why wouldn’t they want people to spend money at the bar?” the resident said in the post. “Locals should be able to get a day pass for the pool. Kinda a bummer, since there are zero ocean front pool bars for the public.”

The only area hotel listed on ResortPass is actually a hotel that sparked controversy earlier this year by reportedly denying a local couple.

Conway resident Brenda Murphy and her husband tried to stay at the Holiday Inn Surfside Beach in February but said they were turned away, despite having a reservation, when they reached the front desk because their IDs said they lived locally. The hotel declined to comment when contacted by a reporter.

“We have enjoyed the Saltaire Coastal Kitchen & Bar in the hotel many times and were shocked when we were told locals are welcome to eat and drink at the hotel, however, they are never allowed to stay,” Murphy said in an email. “Nowhere on their website or posted in the hotel does it say locals are not allowed to stay in the hotel. I asked them to define local and I could not get an answer. Because of our age and the pandemic, we have not traveled in the last several years and were so looking forward for ocean front room and enjoying the restaurant and lounge. We always thought of the hotel as a dream location. They turned it into a nightmare. This should never happen to anyone.”

ResortPass said Holiday Inn Surfside Beach began listing on its service in April and has no problems renting to locals, an important factor considering how much of ResortPass’ customer base is locals.

“In the post-pandemic world, people are just looking for fun and new ways to get together with their friends and their family,” Daly said. “And it really does give you like a mini vacation just for the day without having to jump on a plane or get in the car and travel far distances.”

Holiday Inn Surfside Beach did not respond to a request for comment on whether locals who book a reservation through ResortPass would be allowed to check in at the hotel, given the earlier experience described by Murphy.

Which hotels offer day passes

The only hotel currently listed on ResortPass in Myrtle Beach is the Holiday Inn Surfside Beach. Daly said it won’t stay that way. Myrtle Beach, as well as Charleston, are two of the service’s most-requested destinations in the U.S.

“We are actively trying to expand into more hotels in the South Carolina area,” Daly said. “We have been having some bigger conversations with other hotel management groups and so are hopefully going to have a lot more coming soon. But we do see that there’s a huge amount of demand in the area. ... So for the hotels, there’s a huge opportunity by partnering with us to get additional exposure, but also to drive additional revenue.”

Visitors and locals looking to visit a hotel in Hilton Head, farther down the coastline, can find the Omni Hilton Head Oceanfront Resort on ResortPass. It is the only hotel on the service in Hilton Head.

HotelsByDay currently only has the DoubleTree Resort by Hilton Myrtle Beach Oceanfront available in the Grand Strand, and day passes for that hotel are also available directly through Hilton’s Workspaces program.

Moati said it’s been hard to get hotels to buy into his service so far because he’s asking them to adopt a new way of looking at and handling guests.

One problem standing in the way of growth for either platform is the fact that hotel ownership in Myrtle Beach is highly splintered. The region has dozens of hotels, but many of them are independently owned, and the big chains like Hilton, Marriott, Wyndham and Choice are still growing their footprint. Because of the individual ownerships, it takes more time for ResortPass and HotelsByDay to strike deals that bring a lot of new hotels online.

But this splintering in many ways helps consumers by boosting competition and thereby driving down prices and raising the standard for amenities, said Stuart Butler, the chief marketing officer for the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce.

Another other problem for ResortPass and HotelsByDay is that many hotels have existing systems for managing rooms. So, Butler said, adding on a new technology or a new round of training to handle extra guests is something many labor-strapped hotels simply don’t have time for right now.

So, will the service catch on? That answer remains elusive, Butler said. In some ways, versions of these services already exist, such as when hotels allow anyone to eat at their restaurants or book services at their spas. The Hibiscus Spa at the Marriott Myrtle Beach Resort & Spa at Grande Dunes is just one of many examples found up and down the coastline.

“It’s a benefit, obviously, to locals. It’s a benefit, obviously, to the hotel. But there’s also a trade off,” Butler said. “One of the things you got to consider is does it potentially negatively impact the experience of a more traditional guest at the hotel staying there if you overcrowd the pool area or the gym? ... That’s one of the challenges that the properties have to weigh when they’re looking at it.”