The future of…

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The future of hotels

August 2000

I stay in hotels about once a week on average and there are many things about them that surprise me. I hope that in the future, things will improve.

The first is the common lack of basic modern facilities such as easy access phone and power connections.

The other if that generally I see an inverse correlation between comfort and price. Expensive hotels are certainly usually prettier, with more expensive décor and prettier food. Maybe it's just that I haven't been educated properly, but to me, all too often this translates into pretentiousness. Often, the furniture is very pretty or trendy, but the designer clearly never heard of ergonomics. Similarly, the chef randomly combines obscure ingredients into a visual masterpieces that taste strange and cause almost guaranteed indigestion. Getting the sort of meal you would normally eat everyday is usually impossible. They also assume that because they are a high quality hotel, that all of their guests will want to use room service instead of making their own coffee, so they don't provide tea and coffee facilities in the rooms. It thus takes much longer to settle in, and you need to make sure you have change for tips before arriving. Nor do they provide trouser presses for the same presumed reason. Room lighting levels are often so dim that it makes getting dressed or working into a traumatic experience. More expensive hotels have more pillows and cushions and more bed layers to undo before you can go to bed. The more expensive the hotel, the more individual lights you have to turn on before you can see. In the Royalton in New York, the corridors are so dimly lit you need a torch to get around, and in the room the total lighting level is about 15 watts maximum once everything is turned on. Shaving relies on touch since you can barely see your reflection in the bathroom mirror. But I'm told it is very cool and trendy. The people telling me this are the ones who insist on wearing dark glasses even at night. Certainly I'll never stay in any of their hotels again! Meanwhile, many cheaper hotels often deliver unpretentious simple comfort with good lighting, as well as basics such as tea and coffee facilities. Obviously there are many exceptions. Some cheap hotels are awful, and some expensive ones are wonderful. But often I think that the expensive hotels miss the point. When I travel on business, I don't stay in hotels to look at antiques, feel trendy or soak up the 'atmosphere'. I stay there to get some sleep something to eat, maybe have a swim and do some work, before an engagement the day after. On holiday I want a comfortable base to live from, preferably high on functionality.

So what has this got to do with the future? In the future, companies can find out much more about our preferences, automatically. When I book a trip, my preferences will automatically be considered by my booking agent (human or computer) when searching for a hotel, and will be forwarded to the hotel computer to make sure I get a suitable room and equipment. This is so obvious that it is amazing it doesn't exist as standard procedure yet. The internet will make such things routine right across business and commerce, and hotels will not be able to hide and evade their responsibilities. My preferences list might be quite long, but at least I only have to fill it out once. Hotels that don't hit the mark might still get my business if they have a local monopoly, but at least they will know what I want and have the chance to provide it. By contrast, the only choice I have today is smoking or non smoking.

One ancient development that hasn't made its way into hotels is the combination of 100 watt light bulb and the dimmer switch. I want to have the choice of lighting level, with the capability to illuminate the room brightly if I want. This is a good example how simple technology can allow a wide range of options to be provided by a single system. Also, providing tea and coffee facilities does not preclude the use of room service. Style and functionality can go hand in hand, and we need more of this in hotels instead of an almost exclusive focus on the visual side of interior design.

Hotels still try to make money by charging excessively for calls from the room phone. Most businesspeople simply use their mobiles to avoid this abuse. In the future, further losses of this revenue will surely force hotels to offer communication services from the room at more acceptable prices.

In-room security is very important, and some hotels provide room safes for the guests. This is a very valuable facility and one which I always use when available, but there is one improvement we need here. Safes are big enough for money, travel documents and jewellery, but there is no way I could get my laptop into any hotel safe I have seen, even though it is by far the most valuable item I take with me. In the future, we will carry a wide range of sophisticated equipment with us. Most will be small and portable, but we will still need more safe volume.

As the number of portable devices increases, there will be a growing need for electric sockets that are conveniently situated, as well as communication sockets to plug some of them into. In fact, it should be simple to connect appliances in different rooms together by a LAN. This is already a need for most business travellers, but is still ignored by many hotels that should know better. A range of connectors would be very useful.

While today we have television and pay video in most hotel rooms, few provide video games or internet access from rooms. This will become commonplace over the next few years.

Entertainment will be available in other ways too. Hotels can afford fitness and leisure suites well beyond the budget of the average home. In the future, we will see these make use of virtual environments and VR technology to offer completely new experiences. Fully immersive environments can approximate to the Star Trek holodeck, but would be comfortably within budget for leisure suites in many hotels. These suites could also be used for business meetings, so that hotels might bring some people together physically and others via the network, all into a virtual meeting place. When guests have settled in, they could also be used to give a preview of local facilities and points of interest. In fact, there are so many potential uses of such facilities that hotels might have several. They may consequently capture a lot more business from the business community, running conferences, meetings and away days than they do today.

Another area where hotels can offer extra facilities to guests is in finding other guests with compatible interests. This compatibility might be having mutually worthwhile business interests, or even being potential partners for the night. If the hotel doesn't offer this facility, it might in any case be implemented by ego badges in the hotel bar.

Hotels often cater for conferences, but many are woefully equipped in this area. Hotels need to keep up with new technologies, such as data projectors, and need more convenient power outlets in conference rooms to cope with the many laptops and projectors that are there. All conference rooms should have communications sockets too, preferably with high speed network access. Infrared or radio cordless technology already exists that is more than capable of providing room-wide communications for any number of computers or mobile communicators. It does not require a great deal of cabling.

As with so many of the possible improvements, this is not limited by technology so much as hotel willingness to satisfy the customer. But here at least we will definitely get some improvement. When we can check out the hotel on the internet, compare its facilities and prices directly with others in the same area, and then check the reviews by previous recent guests, we will see a huge increase in hotel competitiveness. While there is no incentive, hotels won't improve, but when their sales are so directly linked to their performance, we will see massive improvements.