I RECENTLY paid a trip to Japan to provide some research support to a major telecommunications trade show through demonstrations and a presentation on our work at BT Labs.
During my week and a half in Tokyo, I stayed at the top-class Hotel Okura, which had recently undergone refurbishment. I’ve also been lucky enough in the last month to spend a night at the newly opened Marriott County Hall in London. So over the last few months, I’ve been fortunate to experience the very latest in hotel bedrooms.
While the thickness of the towels and softness of the pillows are enduring, my concern as a business traveller is with the technical and communications provision.
When I am in the office, I work on-line, with constant access to e-mail, the BT intranet and the resources of the wider public Internet. I need to take that connectivity with me when travelling, and although I am ahead of the pack when it comes to adopting all these new new tools, I am undoubtedly part of a rapidly growing Road Warrior market segment.
Amongst the findings of a a recent American Express survey: 96% agreed that technology has improved business travel; 18% of business travellers access their e-mail three or more times a day; 66% access their e-mail once or twice each day; and 37% must have access to the company network while on the road.
My key needs in a hotel room are power, phone and data. When travelling overseas, I always take a single universal mains adaptor, although this entails a carefully choreographed transition between laptop, mobile phone, personal digital assistant and sometimes camera or other electronic gizmo, as I fight to maintain them all at full charge.
The dance is made less traumatic by desk-level sockets, which remove the need for an undignified scrabble behind the desk or TV to locate a suitable power source.
Both the aforementioned hotels provided several desktop sockets, but although the Marriott also provided US sockets, I have yet to find an overseas hotel with the UK three square-pin option.
I daresay that some hotels may offer adopters on request, but for the impatient customer, convenience and instant gratification are key.
Turning to communications, once again, there may be central facilities in a business centre, but my prime concern is the in-room options.
I typically access my e-mail early in the morning and last thing at night when the business centre is closed.
As with power, I prefer not to have to take to my knees in order to connect my modem to a phone socket. I certainly don’t want to be driven to resort to screwdriver and pliers to make the connection, so please no hardwired phones!
Ideally a separate data connection means that I don’t lose the use of the phone, and it can potentially offer assured quality data lines for fastest possible transfer rates.
Again, both hotels had recognised and responded to this need, and provided a separate data socket although ironically, both were also experiencing technical teething trouble which rendered the service temporarily unavailable.
In future articles, I’ll consider some of the longer-term opportunities for improved connectivity in hotel bedrooms and report on early trials that BT and partners have planned for some of the technology. But back to the present, and which hotel had the edge? Well, probably the Okura on two counts.
The first was an in-room fax machine. Instead of a welcome message on the TV, I was greeted by a welcome fax with my personal direct-dial number. But the real clincher for the Okura was the automatic curtains, operated from my bed-side console – now there’s an application of technology the value of which nobody could question.