What Is Eremito?

There is a hotel with no wifi and rooms of 9 square metres that charges €220 a night. How does it do it?

The answer is very simple: it doesn't sell the room. In Parrano, in Umbria, there is a place called Eremito: 18 cells of 9 square metres each, a 120 cm bed, no television, no wifi, no telephone, and dinner eaten in silence with Gregorian chant in the background. Rates start at 220 euros a night for one person, two nights minimum, and people book, and plenty of them too.

What Eremito is, in a few lines

It was opened in 2013 by Marcello Murzilli, who had previously founded a fashion brand, El Charro (remember the cowboy belts?), then sailed around the world and then built a sustainable hotel in Mexico. Not exactly an ordinary guy. Now he has restored a 14th-century hermitage in the Monte Peglia Biosphere Reserve, far from everything, and has put inside it the structure of the monastic day: the little cell, the refectory, the silence at table.

He calls it a "contemporary, secular hermitage". You get there in a Defender from the car park, because the road isn't made for normal cars. Inside there is a stone hall with a fireplace, a Turkish bath, a yoga room and candlelit corridors.

On the website there is a sentence that bluntly makes an important point clear: "It's not for everyone". Written just like that, on the home page, as the first thing you need to know.

The all-inclusive rate, the smartest part

The price includes everything: vegetarian breakfast, lunch and dinner, wine, herbal teas, morning yoga, meditations, the Turkish bath, walks in the reserve, the Defender. "Nothing is paid for separately, because nothing is an extra": that is the justification they give on the site.

Hotels generally do the opposite. We add. Breakfast separately, parking separately, late check-out separately, the view supplement, the pet supplement, the minibar. Every item is a small revenue and a small decision that we offload onto the guest.

Eremito has understood that whoever arrives there doesn't want to decide anything anymore. So the product is exactly this: from arrival onwards there is nothing left to choose and nothing to pay. The all-inclusive rate is not a price, it is the service.

What it takes away is worth more than what it adds

This is the point that made me think the most. We reason in terms of amenities: the room has a 43-inch TV, fibre wifi, air conditioning, a coffee machine. Every additional star is one more thing in the room.

Eremito makes the list backwards. The cells have no screens, no wifi, no telephone, not even air conditioning, which is replaced by floor cooling and insulated stone walls built the way they used to be. Nine square metres with a bed, a stone writing desk and a window over the valley.

If you read this description on a Booking listing, you want to run away. If you read it on their website, you want to book. The product is the same; what changes is who tells the story and to whom.

The detail of the silent dinner

You are not allowed to talk during dinner. The first reaction is: who goes to dinner without being able to talk? Then you think about how many times you have seen, in a breakfast room, a table of four people staring at four phones. The silence is already there, it's just ugly. Eremito made it beautiful, gave it a rule and a soundtrack, and so it becomes the thing everyone talks about when they get back home.

What it has to do with an ordinary hotel

My hotel, especially when I have groups of young athletes, is a long way from Eremito's monastic silence. In summer I have a party with 700 people, I have a swimming pool, and I have no intention whatsoever of taking away the wifi.

And yet the lesson of Eremito applies to me too, and I think to anyone with a small property. It comes down to three things.

• You can build a hotel around a single idea and leave everything else out. Eremito chose silence, I chose sport. Whoever chooses nothing ends up competing on price with everyone.
• Saying who you are not for is an act of marketing, not a risk. "It's not for everyone" selects the guest before they arrive, and the right guest leaves the right review.
• The price holds if the comparison doesn't exist. Eremito isn't compared with any three-star in the area because nobody searches for "hotel in Parrano": they search for a retreat in silence in Italy, and they find him.

The limit of the model

It is not a recipe to copy. Eremito works because it sits in a place where the silence is real, because it was built by a person with a very particular path behind him, and because it has had thirteen years to become a phrase people search for. Putting "digital detox" on the website of a hotel by the ring road doesn't produce the same effect, it produces a one-star review.

On these pages Silvia Moggia wrote that silence, in hospitality, can be worth more than an immediate reply. She was talking about chatbots, but the principle is the same: sometimes the best service is the one you don't provide.

Eremito took this all the way. It removed the TV, the wifi, the menu, the decisions, and kept only the guest's time. On the website they say that time "is not filled, it is inhabited". It's a brochure line, I know. But the person writing it has been selling eighteen cells of 9 square metres at 220 euros a night for thirteen years, and for a hotelier that is the kind of brochure line worth reading twice.