By Ken Hegan for Toro magazine

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So I’m training to become the World’s Greatest Lover by studying the wisdom of sex gurus like bearded ginger scientists and street hustling sexperts.

This week: I’ve found an unusual way to surprise my superfine girlfriend.

It’s called DayGuest and it’s an online service that lets you book an empty hotel room for an afternoon quickie. Basically DayGuest wants to be your daytime wingman for a fraction of a full night’s cost.

It’s an ingenious, win-win-win service:

1)    Hotels get extra cash for rooms that are otherwise empty,
2)    DayGuest takes a cut for helping tired/sleepy/hornballed customers,
3)    You get a room for a couple of hours if you want a snooze, shower, or some fast and furious relief.

Headquartered in Paris, DayGuest has been offering discounted, short-stay boutique/luxury hotel rooms in international destinations like San Francisco, Rome, Las Vegas, Milan, Miami, London, San Diego, Valencia (Spain), Chicago, L.A., and Barga (Italy).

Now DayGuest’s empire is spreading into Canada. They recently began offering daytime hotel rooms in Toronto and Montreal, offering super-short ‘day stays’ at deeply discounted rates (30-70% off).

They’ve also just hooked up with a Vancouver airport hotel and are planning expansions into Calgary and Ottawa. So now you can enjoy some afternoon delight in one (or all) of 11 Toronto hotels, 10 Montreal hotels (including Le St-Martin Hôtel Particulier Montréal which has an iPod dock and an outdoor pool), and the Delta Vancouver Airport hotel which has a marina for a fast escape.

It’s an efficient use of a hotel’s time. According to DayGuest’s CEO, Philippe Cohen, “DayGuest introduces an opportunity for hotels the same way MP3s did for music.” By MP3s, he means hotels compress the usual stay, charge a reasonable fee, and watch the public come in droves. Cohen is aiming his service at business travellers and tourists who simply need a clean room to nap, splash water on their face, and prepare for daytime meetings or nighttime adventures. Plus they’re happy to help travellers who are “stranded on long stopovers at airports, cross-border business trips, [and] staff sent to locations where corporations have no office.”

I guess they don’t want to promote themselves as an online dating service, though it definitely lends itself to discreet encounters. Their website certainly understands that much of their client base appreciates discretion. They’ve posted a discretion manifesto and say they proudly “enforce our strict privacy policy. We request as little personal information as necessary for bookings, which can often be anonymous.”

And to ensure confidentiality, you can pay anonymously via PayPal. Highly useful if you’re, say, the mayor of a major city who wants to ‘slap some fridge magnets’ on stuff while the rest of us are busy working.

I emailed Cohen to ask his advice on how DayGuest can make me the World’s Greatest Lover. He replied with three ways DayGuest can help:

1) “If you’re living with your family/roommates/etc. and cannot really enjoy privacy. I found, in my short experience, that women are much more sensitive to privacy than men at [the] ‘critical time.’”
2) “If you’re living in a modest environment, going to some of our partner hotels is like splurging on a tasting menu at a three-star Michelin restaurant while only paying the appetizer. No doubt your significant other will appreciate the experience.”
3) “If you’ve been doing the ‘thing’ with your S.O. pretty much the same way for the past year — we’d like to think DayGuest helps rekindle the flame,” wrote Cohen.

Come to think of it, there are TONS of great reasons to book a hotel room for a few hours in the mid-afternoon.

If you have young kids and a super-busy (or super-strict) home life, you can carve out a little private ‘me time’ by stripping off all your clothes, laying naked on a luxury hotel bed, and eating a mountain of Cookie Dough Dynamo ice cream off your excited and quivering chest.

You can enjoy really loud, crazy and anonymous sex without disturbing (or getting finked on by) your neighbours. Plus a short-stay hotel room is perfect if you want to make a sex tape but you only have the budget to film a trailer.

Whatever your story, I love that DayGuest exists and I wish I’d thought of it first. It’s a genius idea. Let’s face it: if some hotel rooms are collecting dust between noon and 2 p.m., why not rent them out to clean-cut ‘business travelers’ who want someone else to clean their sheets?

It sure beats telling them to go have sex (or eat Cookie Dough Dynamo off each other’s chests) in a van, park or playground.

Read more of Ken’s World’s Greatest Lover columns