Business travel is hard. City Lodge has just made bedtime easy

Listen to the meditations here: https://bedtimestories.co.za/

City Lodge takes pride in the reliably stellar quality of our hotel rooms and amenities. But we also know that deliciously downy duvets aren’t always enough to ensure that our guests can rest easy at night.

It doesn’t matter if our mattresses are lush enough to be your personal, horizontal havens; it doesn’t matter how many creature comforts you have at your disposal. Business travel is just intrinsically hard. It’s disruptive. It’s awkward. It’s high-stakes, high-pressure, hyper-social – and it requires you to show up as your best professional self in alien spaces.

According to Harvard Business Review, 75% of business travellers report high stress levels. BCD Travel reports that only 25% of business travellers manage to sleep well. There’s no question that our career-driven guests are losing sleep, the night (or nights) before showtime.

Any hotel worthy of the name offers a complimentary wake-up call: that knock on the door or shrill of the phone is our guarantee that we’ll get you up and at it in time, regardless of how poorly you may have slept the night before.

But City Lodge delights in going the extra mile for our guests, be they beleaguered bosses-in-transit, hassled HR heroes, or insomniac sales reps. That’s why we’ve developed a one-of-a-kind correlate to the trusty wake-up call: the night to its daily grind.

Introducing Bedtime Stories for Business People: a series of hypnotic, meditative narratives written just for rest-bereft professionals like you. Narrated as mellifluous monologues, our yarns are effective soporifics, in same the vein as most tranquilising audio apps – but it wouldn’t be City Lodge if our tales were totally in earnest. Instead, each bedtime story has a comedic bent, characteristic of our usual hijinks-y sense of humour.

A collaboration with our long-term creative partner, agency TBWA/Hunt/Lascaris, Bedtime Stories for Business People are wry, uplifting, and address several classic office archetypes – middle management, HR, and that infamous character from the procurement department included. Should you find dialogue disruptive, you can even drift off to the corporate drone of our patented White-Collar Noise.

Beautiful, intricate animations accompany each Bedtime Story, offsetting their humour to keep listeners rapt in a rhythmic trance. It’s as easy as scanning a QR code on your phone or tablet – or visiting our site via your laptop – and restless guests are transported to a menu of tracks to audit and explore. There’s a dry naughtiness, a levity embedded in each story, which speaks to the trials and travails of working life; but our bedtime stories are no hoax meditations. Instead, they’re our way of ameliorating the tremendous pressure business travellers endure: our contribution to their sense of feeling at home, away from home, with the playful panache people have come to expect from City Lodge and TBWA/Hunt Lascaris.

Work is hard. Dial into easy, with Bedtime Stories for Business People, courtesy of City Lodge.