What you need to know
- Apple has added a hotel to its Austin campus plans.
- The hotel will feature 192 rooms and six stories.
- Apple's campus is expected to open in 2022 for 5,000 employees.
Apple already broke ground on its new corporate campus in Austin, Texas back in November of last year, but that hasn't stopped the company from making changes to its plans for the new home for many of its employees. Reported by CultureMap Austin, Apple has updated its plans with a major addition: a 192-room hotel.
"A revised site plan approved April 29 by the City of Austin shows a 75,500-square-foot, six-story hotel, as well as previously envisioned office buildings and parking garages. The revised plan doesn't cite a hotel brand. The original site plan for the project, filed in December 2018, didn't include a hotel."
John Boyd Jr., principal of Princeton, New Jersey-based corporate location consulting firm The Boyd Co. Inc., says that large companies in a post-pandemic world may follow Apple's plan and add hotels in order to make business travel easier for its customers and employees.
"Apple is a trendsetter in so many ways. Its proposed hotel as part of its new Austin campus is another example of it being ahead of the curve ... having a hotel connected at the hip with its corporate parent is not common now, but in the post-COVID-19 corporate travel world, I expect we will be seeing more of this concept, especially from deep-pocketed tech firms like Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft."
Boyd goes on to say that such a hotel if owned or operated by Apple, would allow the company to have greater control over the safety of travelers to its corporate campuses as well as the employees inside.
"Boyd believes building a hotel on its new Austin campus will give Apple "greater control of its corporate travel operations, and give COVID-leery business travelers a greater sense of security and safety."
The campus is currently planned to open in 2022 to 5,000 employees initially, with an option to eventually house around 15,000 employees.
