This guest editor article was written by Becky Lalanne, Managing Director at Voqa.
The conversation around EV charging in the UK has a blind spot. Open any trade publication, scroll through government policy documents, or tune into the latest infrastructure debate, and you’ll hear the same two narratives repeated: home charging is the backbone of EV adoption, and motorway service stations are the answer to range anxiety on long journeys. Both are true. Neither is the whole picture.
There’s a vast, underserved middle ground; the places where people spend the bulk of their waking hours when they’re not at home and not on a motorway. Hotels. Gyms. Golf clubs. Retail parks. Holiday parks. Co-working spaces. Garden centres. Visitor attractions. These are destination venues, and right now, the EV charging industry is largely ignoring them.
The Numbers Tell the Story
According to Zap-Map, the UK’s leading EV charging network tracker, the overwhelming majority of public charge points are concentrated in two categories: rapid and ultra-rapid chargers clustered along major routes, and slower AC chargers in urban on-street locations. Destination charging, where drivers charge while they dwell, shop, stay, or work, remains a fraction of the installed base, and critically, is growing far more slowly than the EV fleet it needs to serve.
The gap at the venue level is stark. In the hotel sector, for instance, only around 6% of properties currently offer EV charging. For an industry where guest experience and competitive differentiation are everything, that means 94% of hotels are handing a meaningful advantage to those who have already made the investment. The picture is similarly thin across leisure, retail and hospitality. The opportunity to stand out is enormous, and the window to get ahead won’t stay open indefinitely.
What Is a Destination Venue?
A destination venue is any location where people arrive intentionally, stay for a period of time, and then leave. That definition covers an enormous range of businesses: hotels and serviced apartments, health clubs and leisure centres, golf courses and tennis clubs, holiday parks and glamping sites, retail destinations and garden centres, office parks and co-working hubs, stadiums, visitor attractions, and places of worship. What they share is dwell time, and dwell time is exactly what EV charging needs to work well.
Unlike a rapid charger on a motorway forecourt, where drivers want to add 100 miles in ten minutes and get back on the road, a destination charger is there for the two, four, or eight hours a guest, member, or visitor naturally spends on-site. A 7kW or 22kW AC charger is perfectly suited to this use case. By the time a hotel guest checks out after a good night’s sleep, their car is full. By the time a gym member has finished their workout and a smoothie, they’ve added 30–40 miles. No stress. No detour. No queuing.
What Destination Venues Actually Need
The challenge is that most destination businesses aren’t in the energy sector. A hotel operations director, a golf club manager, a retail park facilities team, none of them woke up wanting to become EV infrastructure operators. This creates three clear requirements any charging solution must meet.
First, it must be cost-efficient. Destination venues are not charities, and installing charging hardware that bleeds money through electricity bills without cost recovery is a non-starter. The ability to set tariffs and accept payment directly from drivers, whether guests, members, or visitors, is essential.
Second, venues need control over the quality of the experience. Their charging provision is an extension of their brand. Drivers should be able to plug in and pay effortlessly, using a process that feels as polished as the rest of the guest journey.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, venues need the operational overhead to be near zero. No one in hospitality, leisure, or retail has a budget to hire a dedicated EV charging manager. The back-office must handle itself, reporting, monitoring, billing, without creating a new dashboard for an already stretched team to babysit.
Voqa: Built for Destinations
This is precisely the gap that Voqa was designed to fill. Where many charging solutions have been engineered with motorway forecourts or fleet depots in mind, Voqa has built its product around the specific realities of destination venues.
Voqa chargers feature integrated contactless payment, meaning drivers can tap and charge without an app, a membership card, or a phone call to reception. It works like any modern payment terminal, because that’s exactly what it is. For venues, this means charging pays for itself (and then some), removing the financial risk that has held so many businesses back.
The hardware is tethered, with cables attached to the unit rather than stored in the boot of a car. A nod to anyone who has suffered the inconvenience of wrangling dirty cables before they jump on the commuter train to work. IYKYK! Tethered charging is more convenient, more reliable, and more professional in appearance.
Behind the scenes, Voqa’s managed back-office platform handles everything that would otherwise land on a venue manager’s desk. Monitoring, reporting, revenue tracking, it runs quietly in the background, the way good infrastructure should.
The Time is Now
Voqa is currently running a customer pilot programme and is actively seeking forward-thinking destination businesses that understand what’s coming. EV adoption in the UK continues to accelerate. Drivers are forming habits and loyalties now, and one of those habits is gravitating towards venues that make their EV ownership easier, not harder.
The businesses that install charging today will be the ones whose car parks are full tomorrow. The 6% of hotels already offering charging didn’t get there by accident. They saw where the market was heading and moved early.
If you run a destination venue and you’ve been waiting for the right moment, this is it. The home charging debate has been won. The motorway network is being built. The destination charging opportunity is wide open, and the operators who claim it first will be the ones guests, members and visitors keep coming back to.
Voqa is currently building a waiting list for its first production run. To find out more, visit www.voqa.com/launch-registration
