Hotel or House: What a Work Crew Needs for a Four-Week Job

Contractor accommodation vs a hotel looks like a question about beds. A block of hotel rooms gets your crew through Monday night. A four-week job is 28 nights, and by the second week the question you're answering has changed. It's where eight people eat, where the wet kit dries and where the vans go.

A bed each: hotel rooms or bedrooms in a house

A hotel counts your crew in rooms. Eight people is eight singles or four twins, and what a hotel does well is privacy: everyone can have their own room and their own bathroom. A house can't always match that.

A house is counted in bedrooms, beds and sleeps, and the three numbers can differ. Deja Two in Newport has four bedrooms, lists eight beds and sleeps 13. Sleeps is the listed maximum, so if you want a bed each the number that counts is eight, and those eight beds are in four bedrooms. BudeHaus in Filton has four bedrooms and one bathroom, lists four beds and sleeps 8.

If you need a room each, the house has to be picked for it. The seven-bedroom house in Burnham-on-Sea sleeps 12 and lists six bathrooms. Each of its rooms is listed with one bed, so a crew of seven gets a room each.

Self catering for contractors: somewhere to cook and wash kit

The bed is the part both cover. The kitchen isn't. A standard hotel room has no hob and no washing machine, so dinner is bought out and the kit is washed somewhere else.

Let's say your eight are there five evenings a week. Over four weeks that's twenty dinners each, 160 in all, and a month of site clothes.

A house has both. Ours come with a bed each, parking where the property has it, fast wifi, a full kitchen and a washing machine, with self check in for early starts and late finishes. So your 160 dinners become a weekly shop and the kit is washed where the crew sleeps. Drying is the part that varies: a four-bedroom house that sleeps 10 in Eastville lists a dryer, and most of the houses don't.

Where the vans go: parking at a house and at a hotel

A kitchen doesn't help if your vans have nowhere to go. At a house, parking is whatever that house lists, so you read it house by house.

BudeHaus and Orchid 2, three bedrooms and sleeps 6, are both in Filton and both list free parking. In Newport, CapeHaus lists street and free parking, and Deja Two, the same size, lists none. No house promises space for a van; that's asked about at enquiry.

With a city-centre hotel that has no car park of its own, your vans go in a public one, and in the centre of Bristol that comes down to height. Trenchard Street multi-storey has a height restriction of 2.057m (6ft 9in). The council lists its Queen Square and Wapping Wharf car parks with no height restriction.

Central Bristol is also inside the Clean Air Zone, where a van under 3.5 tonnes that doesn't meet the emissions standard pays £9 for each day it's driven there. The charge goes with the address, so a van at a house inside the zone pays it too.

Filton is outside the zone, and our Filton houses are about 1 mile by road from Airbus and Rolls-Royce. If your site is there, that's contractor accommodation in north Bristol. For a site in the city, contractor accommodation in Bristol lists each house with its parking.

Self check in for early starts and late finishes

From wherever the vans are parked, the morning starts early. A hotel serves breakfast at the hotel's hours. A house keeps your crew's. Self check in means the Sunday night arrival doesn't wait on anyone, and breakfast before a six o'clock start comes out of the kitchen.

The rest of an early start is the road. Almost all Hinkley Point C workers travel to site by bus from park and ride sites, so the morning drive is to the bus. The park and ride at M5 Junction 23 is about 8 miles by road from our house in Burnham-on-Sea. Contractor accommodation in Burnham-on-Sea is that one house, taken whole or by the room.

One invoice for a four-week stay

Four weeks of those mornings later, the bill lands with whoever does your accounts. If a hotel bills by the room, eight rooms come back as eight invoices. A house is one booking.

That one booking has weekly and monthly rates, one invoice per stay and one contact from enquiry to checkout. If your firm works on purchase orders, the stay can go on account against one, and you ask for that when you enquire.

When the job overruns

The invoice assumes your job ends on the day it was meant to. Not every job does. A hotel block extends only if the same rooms are still free that week, and in Bristol hotel occupancy reaches over 80% during the Balloon Fiesta weekend in August.

A house has the same limit. It has one calendar, and a stay can't be extended into dates someone else has already booked. So if your end date is soft, the enquiry is the place to say so.

Long stays aren't unusual in these houses. Across the whole portfolio, 648 bookings had an arrival date between 1 September 2025 and 2 September 2026. Of those, 309 were for a week or more and 103 were for 28 nights or more. Stays over 28 nights are quoted at the monthly rate, the lowest we offer.

In Cardiff, length changes one more thing. From 1 April 2027 the council's visitor levy applies to paid stays of 31 nights or less, in a hotel and in a house alike. A 28-night booking is inside it. A single booking of more than 31 nights is outside it only if it names the people staying and each of them is entitled to stay every night.

When a hotel is the better choice for contractors

For one or two people for a night or two, a hotel room is the simpler booking. A whole house earns its place when you've got a crew and the job runs for weeks.

Where our contractor houses are

The houses are in eight places across Bristol, Somerset and South Wales, each listed under contractor accommodation. If your site is nowhere near them, there's no house of ours for it.

A crew too big for one house takes two, and Newport, Bristol and north Bristol each have more than one large house. The other places are smaller. Contractor accommodation in Cardiff is one apartment in Cardiff Bay with two beds, so a full crew goes to contractor accommodation in Newport.

Contractor accommodation in Chepstow is three apartments that sleep 2 to 4. Contractor accommodation in Ebbw Vale is one three-bedroom house that sleeps 8, and contractor accommodation in Bath is one home in Saltford with two beds. Dates, headcount and site on the accommodation enquiry form get you a quote the same working day.