Hotels are engaging in a technological arms race, piling on guest-room gizmos such as TV projectors and iPods outfitted with guests’ favorite songs. Increasingly, though, travelers such as Laura Gibbon are becoming casualties.
Gibbon, of Brighton, England, stayed earlier this month at Hotel Omm, a chic boutique hotel in Barcelona, Spain. Her children, ages 8 and 10, stayed in an adjacent room and wanted to leave their bathroom lights on overnight. But the light switches were so complicated – there was even a manual for them in the room, Gibbon says – it was impossible to discern how to keep the bathroom lights on and the room lights off at the same time. “If you turn one on, they all go on,” she says.
The front desk sent up an electrician, solving the problem that night but not the next. So, Ms. Gibbon’s husband copied what the electrician did and disconnected a few wires from behind the bed. Their experience at the hotel, which she says also included a shoddy picture on their TV set, contributed to their decision to cut their trip short by a day.
“It’s irritating,” she says. “They kind’ve thought, ‘That’s what people want,’ without thinking you have to invest more behind it to make it work.” (Several calls to Pablo Fernandez, the manager at Hotel Omm, were not returned.)
Now that even budget hotels proffer pillow-top mattresses and high-thread-count sheets, hotels are turning to technology to distinguish themselves. And with rooms rates and occupancy rising, hotels are also flush with cash – 2006 saw the third-highest increase in revenue per available room in 20 years, according to Smith Travel Research. The U.S. lodging industry is expected to invest approximately $5.5 billion in capital spending, up from a record $5 billion last year, according to a recent forecast by PricewaterhouseCoopers. One reason for the spending on technology, says PricewaterhouseCoopers lodging analyst Bjorn Hanson, is that Generation Xers are now traveling at a higher per capita rate than baby boomers. “They don’t want something inferior to what they have at home,” he says.
Choice Hotels’ Cambria Suites, a new brand which opened its debut property in Boise, Idaho, last month, offers flat screens and DVD players with MP3 hook-up. Global Hyatt Corp.’s Hyatt Place brand has touch-screen kiosks for guest registration. Hilton Hotels Corp. is piloting a home theater-like offering called the Sight+Sound.
Consumers complain, though, that gadgets are sometimes broken, the technology can go on the fritz and the infrastructure and support is often lacking.
The 21c Museum Hotel in Louisville, Ky., provides guests with iPods they say are tailored to their personal taste. But Jo Roberts of Indianapolis says the one she received during a stay there last spring was full of Britney Spears, Celine Dion and country, not the Elvis Costello, Tom Waits and jazz-classical mixture she requested. Plus it didn’t work properly.
Some resorts provide parents with walkie-talkies to keep up with their kids, but these too can backfire. Cecilia Keefer of Ridgefield, Conn., says she received one while at the Paradisus Riviera Cancun, a Leading Hotels of the World resort in Puerto Morelos, Mexico, in order to communicate with the babysitter in the room where her two children, then ages three and almost two, were playing. But all she could hear was static – and other parents trying to check in on their kids, too. After three days, she gave up on the devices.
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