- Apr 14, 2001
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The Heartbreak of High-Tech Hotels
By DARREN EVERSON, The Wall Street Journal
Hotels are engaging in a technological arms race, piling on guest-room gizmos like TV projectors and iPods outfitted with guests' favorite songs. Increasingly, though, travelers like Laura Gibbon are becoming casualties.
Ms. 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, Ms. 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 Room in 25 guest rooms at the Hilton Chicago O'Hare Airport and 30 at the Hilton San Francisco, featuring 42-inch plasma TV sets, Yamaha surround sound, XM satellite radio and high-definition TV channels. Hotel Renew, a new boutique hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii, opening this fall, is installing TV projectors in its suites and double rooms. The projectors allow guests to turn their wall into a 4-by-6-foot screen, and they come equipped with wireless headphones that allow guests to listen to the TV while others sleep. Marriott International Inc.'s Renaissance Schaumburg Hotel & Convention Center in Schaumburg, Ill., features bathrooms that have fogless mirrors with 13-inch flat-screen TVs embedded in them.
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 (The hotel asks guests their musical preferences before they arrive.) 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. "When you touched it to scroll through the songs, it spazzed," she says. She tried to exchange it, but she says the concierge was out at the time and she didn't feel like waiting. Steve Wilson, the hotel owner, says it's the first time he's heard of such a situation. In a later stay at the hotel, Ms. Roberts said the iPod she received worked and was properly programmed.
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. "The walkie-talkie is a pain -- it's noisy when you're trying to enjoy a book on vacation -- and it didn't make me feel safer if anything happened with my kids," she says. The resort says that noise sometimes arises when there are many kids present, and that the walkie-talkies generally work well.
Other common gripes are about flat screens that have poorer picture quality than rear-projection sets because of the cable connection; sensor-monitored minibars that record phantom charges (although front-desk employees usually remove such fees swiftly upon request); and, most of all, wireless Internet that doesn't work. David Berman of Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., says that he never has trouble accessing the Internet at coffee shops but often does at hotels, and that the off-site toll-free tech support services he calls have a habit of blaming the victim. "It's like, 'Well, uninstall this and reinstall that,'" he says. "No. I'd like to get email, get a wake-up call and get out of here."
The industry is scrambling to provide better maintenance and support for the proliferation of tech gadgets. Hilton is becoming its own Internet provider, eschewing third-party services. Hilton says it is imposing new standards for its service, including an operations center that monitors the network to ensure that enough bandwidth is available. (The program's North American rollout will be complete in 2008.) Marriott says that as it is installing its new TVs, it is upgrading its cable also, offering high-definition content and expanded channel lineups.
The Ritz-Carlton Co. developed a troubleshooting position years ago called the technology butler. Now, because of the preponderance of high-tech, "everyone has to be a technology butler on our staff," says Brian Gullbrants, Ritz-Carlton's vice president of operations. So in addition to on-site tech specialists, Ritz-Carlton says that its front-desk and call-center employees also undergo a tech certification as part of their training, enabling them to assist with common problems like Internet inaccessibility.
Some hotels have added high-tech gadgets, only to discover that many guests need human handholding. The Hyatt Regency St. Louis has a kiosk where guests can check-in without talking to a person. But, on a recent Friday afternoon, an employee was stationed next to the machine showing guests how to use it. And some consumers avoid the gadgets altogether. At the Millenium Hilton in New York, which also boasts check-in kiosks, not a single guest used the machines during a recent 5-6 p.m. stretch -- even when the line to see a person was four deep. "Not everybody is going to want it all the time," says Robert Machen, Hilton's vice president of corporate systems.
By DARREN EVERSON, The Wall Street Journal
Hotels are engaging in a technological arms race, piling on guest-room gizmos like TV projectors and iPods outfitted with guests' favorite songs. Increasingly, though, travelers like Laura Gibbon are becoming casualties.
Ms. 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, Ms. 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 Room in 25 guest rooms at the Hilton Chicago O'Hare Airport and 30 at the Hilton San Francisco, featuring 42-inch plasma TV sets, Yamaha surround sound, XM satellite radio and high-definition TV channels. Hotel Renew, a new boutique hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii, opening this fall, is installing TV projectors in its suites and double rooms. The projectors allow guests to turn their wall into a 4-by-6-foot screen, and they come equipped with wireless headphones that allow guests to listen to the TV while others sleep. Marriott International Inc.'s Renaissance Schaumburg Hotel & Convention Center in Schaumburg, Ill., features bathrooms that have fogless mirrors with 13-inch flat-screen TVs embedded in them.
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 (The hotel asks guests their musical preferences before they arrive.) 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. "When you touched it to scroll through the songs, it spazzed," she says. She tried to exchange it, but she says the concierge was out at the time and she didn't feel like waiting. Steve Wilson, the hotel owner, says it's the first time he's heard of such a situation. In a later stay at the hotel, Ms. Roberts said the iPod she received worked and was properly programmed.
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. "The walkie-talkie is a pain -- it's noisy when you're trying to enjoy a book on vacation -- and it didn't make me feel safer if anything happened with my kids," she says. The resort says that noise sometimes arises when there are many kids present, and that the walkie-talkies generally work well.
Other common gripes are about flat screens that have poorer picture quality than rear-projection sets because of the cable connection; sensor-monitored minibars that record phantom charges (although front-desk employees usually remove such fees swiftly upon request); and, most of all, wireless Internet that doesn't work. David Berman of Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., says that he never has trouble accessing the Internet at coffee shops but often does at hotels, and that the off-site toll-free tech support services he calls have a habit of blaming the victim. "It's like, 'Well, uninstall this and reinstall that,'" he says. "No. I'd like to get email, get a wake-up call and get out of here."
The industry is scrambling to provide better maintenance and support for the proliferation of tech gadgets. Hilton is becoming its own Internet provider, eschewing third-party services. Hilton says it is imposing new standards for its service, including an operations center that monitors the network to ensure that enough bandwidth is available. (The program's North American rollout will be complete in 2008.) Marriott says that as it is installing its new TVs, it is upgrading its cable also, offering high-definition content and expanded channel lineups.
The Ritz-Carlton Co. developed a troubleshooting position years ago called the technology butler. Now, because of the preponderance of high-tech, "everyone has to be a technology butler on our staff," says Brian Gullbrants, Ritz-Carlton's vice president of operations. So in addition to on-site tech specialists, Ritz-Carlton says that its front-desk and call-center employees also undergo a tech certification as part of their training, enabling them to assist with common problems like Internet inaccessibility.
Some hotels have added high-tech gadgets, only to discover that many guests need human handholding. The Hyatt Regency St. Louis has a kiosk where guests can check-in without talking to a person. But, on a recent Friday afternoon, an employee was stationed next to the machine showing guests how to use it. And some consumers avoid the gadgets altogether. At the Millenium Hilton in New York, which also boasts check-in kiosks, not a single guest used the machines during a recent 5-6 p.m. stretch -- even when the line to see a person was four deep. "Not everybody is going to want it all the time," says Robert Machen, Hilton's vice president of corporate systems.
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