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

Morning wake-up calls have been a staple at hotels since the early 1900s. Now, City Lodge is pioneering its own brand of nocturnal hospitality, with Bedtime Stories for Business People. Anxious travellers tossing and turning the night before a dreaded conference or pitch have recourse to a witty repertoire of bespoke tales – funny, nuanced audible narratives with genuinely relaxing properties. 

City Lodge takes pride in the reliably stellar quality of its hotel rooms and amenities, but it also knows that deliciously downy duvets aren’t always enough to ensure that its guests can rest easy at night.

It doesn’t matter if City Lodge’s 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 its 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 its guarantee that it’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 its guests, be they beleaguered bosses-in-transit, hassled HR heroes or insomniac sales reps. That’s why it has 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, its yarns are effective soporifics, in the same vein as most tranquilising audio apps – but it wouldn’t be City Lodge if its tales were totally in earnest. Instead, each Bedtime Story has a comedic bent, characteristic of its usual hijinks-y sense of humour.

A collaboration with City Lodge’s 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 its 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 its 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 the Bedtime Stories are no hoax meditations. Instead, they’re City Lodge’s way of ameliorating the tremendous pressure business travellers endure: its 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. Listen to the meditations here: https://bedtimestories.co.za/