New Swedish Concept Hotel Offers Homeless Experience
A very special hotel has opened doors in Gothenburg, Sweden. Faktum Hotels has no rooms, but offers places to sleep that the city’s homeless might also use.
Hotel visitors book a ‘room’ online and will be led to a popular rough ‘bedroom’ for the homeless somewhere in the city. The hotel is an initiative by Swedish charity magazine Faktum and wants to raise awareness for the large group of homeless people in Gothenburg. Many of the city’s 3,400 homeless in the city find a place to sleep with friends, families or in institutional shelters. However, still a large group has to sleep under the open sky, which is not an ideal situation if you think of the Scandinavian temperatures in the winter.
Faktum has selected ten extraordinary locations where the homeless might spend the night and made it possible to book them the same way you would book a ‘normal’ hotel room. Customers can, for instance, book a spot under a bridge, in a derelict factory or on a public bench. Booking a room costs €10 a night. Whether or not people decide to really stay in their booked ‘room’ is up to them. Users can book a room for themselves or as a gift for somebody else, for example a friend on Facebook.
The revenues of Faktum Hotels are used to support the charity work of Faktum Magazine, that’s sold by people without a permanent home. The project is supported by media agency Forsman & Bodenfors, that has created a website for the campaign and a booking system.
