A Night in the Hotel of the Future

Roland Piquepaille writes "Michael S. Lasky was lucky enough to test the amenities of the "Room of the Future", Room 267 of the Hilton Garden Inn in El Segundo, California. Among other things, the room provides a wall-mounted, 42-inch flat-screen HDTV Panasonic plasma television, a biometric room safe, free broadband, accessible via laptop or the TV, or a Panasonic massage chair. Needless to say, Lasky didn't have enough time to test everything during his one-night stay, but was quite pleased. Check this column for a summary and a picture of the "Room of the Future.""

Comments

So What?

[kevin_conaway]

Big Deal. Hotel rooms should basically have a nice bed and nice bath. Personally, if I am going on vacation, I want to spend as much time OUT of the hotel room as possible but when I come back I want to get a good nights sleep and get clean the next morning. This type of stuff is designed to attract the people who bought those old Acer computers just because they had a black case.

Re:So What?

[Demon of the fall]

Hotel rooms should basically have a nice bed and nice bath. Personally, if I am going on vacation, I want to spend as much time OUT of the hotel room as possible

Well, this is true for tourists like you and me, but I'm quite sure that business travelers don't spend their entire nights outside... They probably want to relax in their room after spending ours in endless meetings, and an addition of a massage chair and a 42" plasma TV probably is a nice bonus.

Re:So What?

[kiwimate]

Hear hear. I've been on both sides of the coin -- travelling as a tourist, I spend as little time as possible in the hotel room. But, having done the consultant thing, including a stretch of 100% travel (get up Monday morning, kiss wife goodbye, come back Friday night, kiss wife hello, enjoy weekend, lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseam), a comfortable hotel room with pleasant amenities makes a huge amount of difference. It's especially welcomed when you're stuck in your hotel room doing business in the evening and you can take a decent quick shower to refresh yourself, or finish off a 16 hour day by raiding the mini-bar and watching television.

More importantly, such amenities will put one in a better frame of mind and result in a more relaxing time, giving added benefit to the client (a happy consultant is a more productive consultant) and the spouse when you get home. For professional and personal reasons in such a scenario, this could only be a leg up in the business traveller's world.

Re:So What?

[aallan]

Hotel rooms should basically have a nice bed and nice bath. Personally, if I am going on vacation, I want to spend as much time OUT of the hotel room as possible...

As someone who sometimes has to spend months at a hotel when I'm abroad on business, I totally disagree. Business travel is very different to vacation travel, you're there for different reasons and you want different things. I'd kill for a hotel room with a decent entertainment system and broadband when I'm away on business.

Al.

Quiet minifridge?

[jgerry]

I found this to be most interesting:

a compressor-less mini-refrigerator that is completely silent

I want more and more quiet appliances, including computers. Everything is so freakin' noisy now! I wish more industrial design took this into account. Yay future!

things of the future...

[imaginate]

I hate to say it, but I'm a little tired of things that pawn themselves off as "of the future," when they're just showcases for the most expensive, newest stuff that's already floating around.

Maybe it's because the real "hotels of the future" won't be any more exciting than they are now. If they're motels, they'll be cheap - if they're five star hotels, they'll simply emulate what's in the best houses, plus a feature or two (whooo, biometric safe).

Room of the Future? No Room of the Rich

[binaryDigit]

What's so futuristic about a room that uses technology available for the household for at least 10 years (broadband not withstanding). OK the tv is plasma, but it's still just a big tv. Anybody could offer a room like this if they could get away with charging the extra amount it would cost to pay for it.

Now when you can get a room like this at Motel6 for $39.95 at night, then wake me up.

Room of the future?

[Andorion]

This isn't the hotel room of the future... it's the hotel room of today, if you're rich enough.

~Berj

Beach

[drooling-dog]

Give me a nice beach just outside my sliding-glass door, and you can keep all this other crap...

Re:Apache displacing IIS?

[erikdotla]

These "things" of the future (homes, rooms, toilets) are always the same thing: They are not the Whatever of the Future, but simply the Whatever of the Very Rich.

I firmly believe that our futures hold simplicity, non-intrusiveness, and ease of use where technology is concerned. If television still exists in 100 years, it will be a nearly invisible unit, projecting onto a wall or an image floating in midair. Technology will dissolve into the very fabric of our lives as such that we will appear to be living in the 17th Century, when in fact we have lots of technology at our disposal.

I also do not believe that the capitalist system will disappear anytime soon. There will always be the rich, the middle class, and the poor. Most people cannot access high technology until it drops to commodity prices.

If you want to see what the future holds for technology, study the markets for the types of components that make up that technology. That which becomes cheap becomes widespread and ubiquitous.

Blogs about blogs aboug blogs...

[malakai]

I'm getting a little annoyed at refering to references that refer to referenes that refer to a source article.

The content on Roland Piquepaille blog is always worthless. This is at least the third story he submitted (and was approved) that links you to his site, where they quotes from the article, and then says a very obvious sentance about that quote.

This all started back in Nov of 2002 see: for his articles

I don't get it. If you find something intresting, and you want to submit it to slash dot, then do so. Why make a blog, so you can submit, so you can refer to your blog.

I'm not getting into conspiracies about money or ads or anything. Near as I can tell none of that is involved here.

I just get annoyed going to his blogs to find he just quots the article, and has no real insight or other information.

-Malakai

The Los Angeles Times has a better erticle

[Animats]

The LA Times article on Hilton's "rooms of the future" has less hype and more useful info. Hilton has set up 14 rooms at their El Segundo property with various new conveniences. They assign people who are in their "frequent flyer" type program to these rooms at random, and after they've stayed a night, ask them for comments.

One of the most popular features is very simple - two hooks on the inside of the bathroom door.

Hilton is doing this because they made an expensive mistake. They tried a smart card system in New York, using the same card to unlock rooms, pay for meals, and make phone calls. People hated it. So now they use their rather boring location in El Segundo (next to LAX) to debug.

Hotels have a terrible problem with guest-visible technology - all their users are new. They don't want to hand a manual to each guest, or get calls for tech support. So it has to be subtle. This is good; too many products come with far too many controls for things the system should be managing itself. It's a nice design exercise to design technology for hotels.