Yesterday we mentioned that the Regent Palms Hotel in Turks & Caicos offered complimentary WiFi to its guests throughout the property.
Now we hear that the Regent has stepped up its hotel technology even further by adding Noxon internet radios in each guest room that pick up 10,000 international stations.
As you can imagine, guests can tune in to get their local radio station no matter where they are from so there's absolutely no excuse to miss your country's Top 40 Countdown which is probably hosted by Ryan Seacrest. Also, the Noxon comes with an iPod docking station.
The Regent Palms is the only hotel in North America to have one of these radios but they are also found in the rooms at the Peninsula Hotel Tokyo.
Our Annual WiFi Report will help you avoid having to use something like this when staying at a hotel.
It is time once again for one of our most popular features, HotelChatter's annual look at hotel brands with the Best and Worst Hotel WiFi offerings.
In 2007, we boldly stated that the hotel WiFi landscaped had reached an impasse. And this year, we are sad to report that again, there hasn't been much movement.
The same complex formula still applies when hotels consider offering internet. We are sure hoteliers and hotel general managers have some elaborate mathematical equation which they use but we'll just simplify it for you here:
If high room rate and/or luxury status, then no free WiFi.
Yes, luxury hotels continue to nickel and dime you for a service that could easily be rolled into your room rate or resort fee while budget hotels like Best Western and Holiday Inn have free working WiFi throughout. And don't even get us started on some hotels that are beyond fashionably late to the wireless party and only offer ethernet connections in rooms.
But don't despair. There is still some good news to share here and we're going to spend the rest of the week educating you about the Hotel WiFi Landscape of 2008.
Just perfect for our generation of short attention span travelers (and we definitely include ourselves), Westin Hotels are going to help us get fit by including the Wii gaming system in their fitness centers. That means that we'll be able to play virtual bowls or do some virtual boxing rather than just sitting on an exercise bike staring at the TV. And that means we have half a chance of being interested enough to do it.
The Westin-Wii deal has started out with installation at the Westin Bellevue near Seattle and the Westin Times Square in New York. During this month, the Wiis will be turning up in a number of other Westins including Houston, Kansas City, San Francisco and Toronto, and if guest feedback is positive they plan to install them in more.
Nintendo's done a deal with Westin to give them Wiis that will automatically update to the newest versions and games, no disc required, so it's not even a system that will get out of date. We have to admit, we think we would make a booking decision purely based on the Wii. Would you?
Was this ToteVision tested in a storage facility in New York before you turned it on? Probably.
The NY Times has a look inside some of the test rooms that hotels set up before they actually open a hotel or before they begin to offer a new technology or service.
There's the Room X inside the Marriott Courtyard at the University of Delaware which is testing every high-tech guestroom gadget imaginable. There's also the Westin Chicago River North which we learned was a test center for the jet lag therapy program.
But other hotels are testing their shizz out too. Hyatt Place built an entire test hotel in Scottsdale, Ariz. The James Hotel Chicago has a test site in Queens while Kimpton Hotels use the wine hours in the lobby (usually 5 to 6pm every night) to "supplement research on what guests want." Aha! We knew there was a catch to free wine.
We also know that Aloft and Element Hotels, the newest brands from Starwood, have a test site/warehouse in God-knows-where upstate New York.
But these test sites aren't really necessary. You can always go the route of Thompson Hotels which open the rooms as soon as humanly possibly, even if exterior and interior construction needs to be finished, thus undergoing trial and error while giving guests a cheap rate for being the guinea pig.
We had some technical difficulties a few weeks ago when we first posted our review on the Hyatt Regency Denver and thus we couldn't get up all of our pictures from the room. (Let's just say our computer hates traveling.)
But now we present you with some more snaps inside room 1134 which we scored on Priceline.com for $75 a night. Don't forget to watch the hotel video tour here.
JDV Hospitality has opened a new hotel in the technology capital of the U.S.--Silicon Valley. And as an ode to the tech culture, the hotel's name is Domain Hotel. And the restaurant on-site is called Bytes Restaurant and Lounge.
As with all JDV properties, there's free wireless throughout the hotel but interesting the hotel's guestrooms don't really cater to the go-go-go mentality of the tech world.
The 136 guestrooms and suites are decorated in two themes: Tranquility and Awakening, which can be customized to each guest’s individual preference and mood. Guestrooms feature flat-panel televisions, iPod docking stations, and simple, honest office workspaces that you can sleep in.
The tranquility rooms have a serene blue color scheme and are scented with lavendar. Get the tranquility executive suite which has a jacuzzi bathtub. The awakening rooms have a green "forest" design and a lemongrass scent designed to invigorate you. Again, get the executive suite with the jacuzzi.
There's also a fitness center and outdoor heated pool on site. Rates start at $219 a night during the week and at $119 on the weekends.
Tonight's the opening party for the Domain Hotel which shows you just how new this place is. But JDV already has a presence in Silicon Valley with the Wild Palms Hotel and the Google Hotel aka Hotel Avante.
This is room 1134 inside the Hyatt Regency Denver where we spent some time this past weekend. As we told you yesterday, we had a successful check-in attempt with the self-service kiosks in the lobby and that probably set the tone for the rest of our stay.
Actually, maybe the feel-good tone started way before that when we actually booked the hotel room. We did it through Priceline, our first time booking through that site. And our bid of $75 was accepted right away.
Regular room rates at the hotel, which are higher during the week when conventions are in full force across the street, are about $235. That might be too high for us, after all it's a Hyatt in Denver near a convention center but the place is pretty fantastic.
And since the Dems have made this their headquarters hotel for the DNC this August, here's what they can expect.
Hotel check-in kiosks have never quite taken off the way that airport check-in kiosks have. Indeed, the hotel's versions of easy check-in have been labeled "dust collectors" in the past and we've read a ton of reports that these things just don't work.
Well, maybe that is about to change.
We checked into the Hyatt Regency Denver (aka the headquarters hotel for the DNC this summer) over the weekend and upon walking into the lobby, a greeter immediately ushered us over to the machines (pictured above). Before we could protest, the greeter urged us to give the kiosk a try.
It was incredibly easy. We simply swiped the credit card that we used to book the room and the touch-screen process went very similarly to the airport check-in. We selected a king bed and even joined the Hyatt Gold Passport program.
Interestingly enough, we booked the room via Priceline and not directly through the hotel. But that didn't matter here. The greeter also informed us that they have had the machines since the hotel opened in 2005 and they have had no problems with them. Could this be the start of a new life for the dust collectors?
Yesterday we mentioned that the Regent Palms Hotel in Turks & Caicos offered complimentary WiFi to its guests throughout the property. 
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by juliana
