There is a very special hotel in Sweden. Here tourists don’t pay the price per night, as it usually happens, but according to the amount of time they spend on social networks. It is undoubtedly an original and nice idea to fight virtual addiction. Let’s find out together how it works.
If you can spend a night without checking your socials every minute, the stay is free! It’s not a joke, but an initiative launched by the Bellora Hotel and Restaurant located in Gothenburg, Sweden. The project is called The Ceck Out Suite. The aim is to try to get people detox from the mania of constantly checking their mobile phones. As an incentive, the hotel promises to give a free night stay to those who can break this addiction.
Hotel Bellora, together with the insurance company Länsförsäkringar, offers a very unique way to find out whether or not you are on social or on the phone. Basically, everything works through a smart lamp, the Skärmfri, which connects to the same network as your mobile phone. Thanks to this technology, managers are able to measure how much you are on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Snapchat. As you spend time connected, the light changes from white to red.
So in the end, the price of the night is determined by the estimated usage of the lamp. The downside is that if you can‘t resist and look at your mobile phone, you‘ll have to pay 20 SEK (just over two dollars) for every minute you spend online. If you exceed the half-hour limit that the hotel considers relevant for two people, you will have to pay the same price as the others. Your stay will therefore cost you approximately $255.
The purpose of this initiative is to put a stop to the immoderate use of the telephone and the internet today. Several organizations, in fact, have conducted studies on the subject, highlighting such problem as well as the benefits of digital detox. Among them, the universities of New York and Stanford have recently established that staying a month without the use of social media increases general well-being, while reducing anxiety and depression.
“We want to encourage people who stay with us to enjoy the moments they spend together and not to focus on the phone screen,” says the hotel on its website.