Hotel chargers become the charge point operator’s capital cost

On 20 October Roam, a Crawley-based charge point operator, said it had won a contract to install 170 charging sockets across 14 hotels owned by ProsperCap Corporation, a hotel owner listed on the Catalist Board of the Singapore Exchange. Roam is paying for the project, and installation started in September 2026.

ProsperCap owns 17 predominantly upscale hotels with 3,383 keys in regional cities, so the contract reaches all but three of them. The hotels trade under Hilton, IHG and Marriott brands through franchise agreements and are managed by Valor Hospitality Europe. The split is 158 sockets at 22kW and 12 rapid sockets at 50kW, an average of about 12 sockets per hotel.

The release describes the project as “provider-fully funded” and says the hotels can upgrade their charging “without the need for significant upfront capital investment”. James Randall, chief executive of Roam, said charging is increasingly part of the infrastructure hotel guests expect to find, and set out the model: “By funding, installing and operating the chargers, we can help hospitality businesses respond to that demand without EV charging becoming another complex infrastructure project for their teams to manage.”

At these 14 hotels, charging is being paid for by the charge point operator rather than the property owner. The capital cost and the running of the hardware sit with Roam. The hotels get an amenity their guests increasingly expect, without significant upfront capital investment. What ProsperCap gives in return, beyond the bays in its car parks, has not been made public.

What the owner trades for funded hardware

Neither company disclosed the contract’s value, its length or how charging revenue is divided. Roam’s offer to other businesses earlier in the month shows the terms it has put to other sites. On 7 October, as reported by Zapmap, Roam offered £500 for each qualifying single-socket charger it replaced and £1,000 for each dual-socket charger, with the replacement equipment and standard installation at no cost. The condition was a long-term lease or other site agreement with Roam, and Zapmap reported that organizations could also earn ongoing revenue through the partnership.

An operator that pays for the hardware has to recover that cost from use over time, and Roam’s replacement offer was tied to a long-term site agreement rather than a one-off install. Randall described the ProsperCap chargers as infrastructure that can support increasing numbers of electric vehicles “for many years to come”.

Weerachai Amornrat-Tana, acting chief executive of ProsperCap, made the case in terms of guests: “A growing number of our guests now travel in EVs, and reliable charging is an increasingly important part of the upscale experience they expect from our hotels.” The same statement presented the deal as protecting “the long-term value and appeal of our properties as EV adoption grows”. For a listed owner of 17 hotels, that turns charging from a capital line into a feature of the asset, paid for by someone else.

Two speeds for two kinds of driver

The 158 sockets at 22kW – 93% of the total – suit cars parked overnight or through a long meeting, while the 12 rapid sockets at 50kW suit shorter visits. Randall said: “Different hotel users have very different charging requirements, from overnight guests who may have many hours available to charge through to visitors who need to recharge their battery much more quickly. A well-designed hotel charging network needs to accommodate both.”

The release says the sockets serve “hotel guests, visitors and other EV drivers”, and Zapmap reported that Roam’s chargers can be found and paid for through the Zapmap app. That puts the bays on a public network as well as on a guest amenities list. For fleet directors whose drivers stay at these 14 hotels, the 22kW bays mean a car can charge while its driver sleeps, and the 50kW bays add the hotel car park to the stops a driver passing through can use.

Destination charging is the slow end

Zapmap’s Q3 2026 statistics, published on 6 October, counted 124,738 public chargers on its platform at 48,298 locations at the end of September, up 9% year on year. Destination chargers, the category the release places hotel charging in, numbered 64,289, up 4.26%. Ultra-rapid chargers of 150kW and above numbered 15,335, up 39.1%.

Working back from those growth rates, the ultra-rapid band added about 4,300 chargers in the year and the destination category about 2,600, even though destination chargers outnumber ultra-rapid ones by more than four to one. New capacity is going disproportionately into high-power chargers, while destination charging, which accounts for about half of all public chargers, grows slowly.

That is the market in which Roam is offering to fund hotel chargers. The release says Roam was named the leading hotel charging network in July 2026, after analysis of Zapmap data showed it running more hotel charging sockets than any other charge point operator on Zapmap’s map. In May it announced 112 charge points across 20 Hand Picked Hotels locations, which it said it would install and operate. In a destination category that grew 4.26% in the year to September, paying for the hardware is how Roam is winning hotel car parks.

The ProsperCap deal moves the cost of charging hardware at 14 hotels from the owner to the operator: Roam carries the capital cost and runs the sockets, the hotels have 170 of them on their car parks without significant upfront capital investment, and the terms that decide who earns from those sockets over the years remain private.