A New Look at Hotel Guest Rooms | By Deirdre Renniers

For the well-travelled business traveller or tourist, the hotel room experience can be dull. Usually the various hotel experiences become hazy - each guest room could be in any hotel, anywhere in the world. This is because the room configuration and experience is generally the same in most hotels. This negative experience is caused by lack of personality, banality and monotony.

For decades hotel rooms have generally included the same standard layout, with the enclosed bathroom (with shower over tub) in the corner of the room adjacent to the entrance, the wardrobe and mini bar area in the entrance hall, and a room with the bed facing a desk area and TV console. A loose armchair with a small coffee table is usually at the window facing the bed. Windows are usually sealed with two layers of drapes.

Boutique hotels have always tried to break away from this layout to create a different experience. However breaking away from the norm has been a challenge, with the usual problems associated with plumbing, housekeeping issues, and space constraints.

Unconventional Layouts

When it comes to depicting a hotel experience, our lexicon usually describes a journey primarily of sights—soothing room ambience, extravagant lobby décor and so on—with glossy, high-resolution photographs as worthy complements. Next on the list is sound, portrayed as crashing ocean waves, birds chirping peacefully at a bucolic resort, or for urbanites, a quiet space fit for a restful sleep between harried business days. Meanwhile, restaurants and bars excite with poetic verses that stimulate the palate, while bed sheet linens and marble-tiled bathrooms do wonders to arouse the sense of touch.

Larry Mogelonsky
What’s often left out of the picture is the fifth spoke on the wheel: smell. Not that the people who write your promotional materials morally abstain from infusing this, but there’s simply nothing in the room, lobby or hallways to spark an aromatic reaction. Our sense of smell can at times be highly underrated for its powerful psychological effect on people’s moods, but more can be done to activate it in a positive way.

Hyatt is taking some fascinating initiatives to cater to a modern, high-tech audience—most notably, setting up eight properties as "lab hotels" throughout the world. Four of the hotels are in the U.S. and the rest are in cities like Dehli, Hong Kong and London. And it as at these hotels where John Prusnick, director of IT innovation and strategy, leads major IT experiments and initiatives, ComputerWorld recently reported.

At any time, there are seven to nine unique projects under way at the lab hotels, and IT spends no more than 90 days on any one idea. The projects that don't make the big time are chalked up to "return on experience" rather than ROI, Prusnick explains.

The global economy is uncertain at best, travel is a hyper-competitive landscape with new services and products are launching daily and the travel consumer becoming ever more savvy, fickle and demanding. In this environment how can travel companies possibly survive, let alone thrive?

With less than one week to go before the EyeforTravel team head to Las Vegas for TDS North America we consider the most pertinent emerging themes in online travel and consult some of the events most exciting speakers for their expert insights and predictions.

1. Get ready for a mobile-only world

The decade of mobile is FINALLY here. By 2015, IDC is forecasting that smartphone sales will reach 982 million and all research points to mobile use surpassing traditional desktop use within the next few years. Against this back drop there are numerous emerging trends the industry needs to keep pace with.