Hotel guests would rather Netflix and chill than watch pay-per-view porn, new research shows.
Adult entertainment has long been a profitable source of in-room entertainment for hotels, but the proliferation of high-speed internet, and guests who bring their own streaming devices, has reduced the need for video rentals at chains around the world.
Just 1% of occupied hotel rooms around the world order video rentals on an average day, and adult programming accounts for 90% of those profits, Variety reported, citing research from Enseo, a firm that sells in-room entertainment technology to hotels. But, at hotels that offer Netflix on room TVs, 40% of rooms stream the service on a typical day, Enseo found. That’s 40 times the number of rooms that rent video at all.
While Netflix doesn’t stream porn per se, it does offer “steamy” titles that hotel guests can enjoy. They include romances like Frida, sci-fi and fantasy movies like Barbarella, which stars Jane Fonda and which Netflix describes as ”science fiction, but it’s sexy,” and thrillers like Naked After Midnight, about a stripper who seeks revenge on her sister’s killer. Clearly a classic.
Those who stream Netflix on hotel TVs also tend to watch for longer than most other types of TV content, like news and sports, according to Enseo.
Unfortunately for the travel industry, hotels don’t usually earn revenue when guests stream Netflix to their rooms because they sign in with own accounts. That’s significantly weakened the revenue that hotels earn from in-room video rentals. Commercial real-estate firm CBRE, which tracks in-room video rentals including video games and music, said that video-rental revenue per available room at US hotels plunged 75% since 2000.
Enseo works with hotel chains around the world including those owned by Marriott, the world’s largest hotel operator by room count, to integrate apps like Netflix, Hulu, and Pandora into hotel TVs. Last year, it began bringing the Netflix app into hotels, and has reportedly rolled it out in 100,000 rooms, including those at big-name properties like the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas, Nevada. The data reported here was collected by Enseo from its global hotel partners.
Some hotel chains have cut adult entertainment out of their video libraries, as they’re also no longer bringing in the kind of revenue they used to. Marriott International said it was pulling mature content from its new hotels back in 2011. And Hilton, the second largest hotel company, followed suit in 2015. Overall, fewer and fewer hotels are offering pay-per-view video at all. Sixteen percent of US hotels surveyed by the American Hotel & Lodging Association offered video-on-demand services in 2016, down from 30% in 2012, according to data provided by travel-research firm STR.