Japan hotel offers $1 hotel stays ... in exchange for livestream video

A Japanese hotel is offering guests the option of $1 stays – with a catch.

Asahi Ryokan, a 10-room hotel in Fukuoka, offers a room rate of 100 yen, or approximately $1.22 CAD, if guests agree to have their stay livestreamed to YouTube. In an interview with CNN, hotel manager Tetsuya Inoue (who’s grandmother owns the hotel) said that he came up with the concept as a new way to promote the property.

The livestream option is currently only available in room eight – which Inoue said was previously the hotel’s least popular room – and the camera is only pointed toward the common area of the room and away from the shared bathroom. Guests are allowed to turn off the lights and have control over the camera’s microphone.

The livestream channel started on Nov. 17 and already has more than 5,000 subscribers.

Room rates in the hotel's other rooms are approximately $27.

Japan is no stranger to quirky hotel concepts: the concept of the capsule hotel originated in Osaka in 1979 and at Japan’s Henn-na Hotels chain (which translates to both ‘strange’ and ‘change’ in Japanese), the properties are almost entirely staffed by robots.

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