There's tons of hotel news flying around this week and we don't have time to give each and every story the love and attention it may deserve, so you will have to settle for some news briefs.
· Cisco Hooks Up Taj Hotel Rooms With Teleconferencing Skills: Select Taj Hotels in three locations will sport a room outfitted by Cisco with the latest in videoconferencing gear. These Cisco TelePresence rooms will be available to the public at $400 an hour. No nookie allowed! [ComputerWorld]
· Hard Rock Hotel Set for Abu Dhabi: Add this to the list of stuff opening in Abu Dhabi. We want to know what isn't opening in Abu Dhabi? A Whole Foods? Nah. That will probably open there too. [Hard Rock Hotels]
· A New Jersey Element: And it has nothing to do with the Parkway, the Sopranos or bad accents. An Element Hotel is opening in Ewing, NJ which is like near Trenton or something. [NJ.com]
In today's technological world, even Web nerds like us are forced to admit that there's something irreplaceable about the handwritten note. A positive online hotel review lacks the familiarity and comraderie built between satisfied hotel guests and the hoteliers who served them be found in the hotel guest book.
New Zealand's new Hotel So has found a solution to this. In conjunction with its comprehensive site, the hotel launched weloveso.com, a page dedicated to scanned images of the hotel's guest book. No word on whether they white-out any negative reviews. But the Christchurch-based hotel offers ultra modern facilities, free WiFi, and flat screen TVs starting at $69. Sounds like there's not much to complain about.
We just wrote about Hyatt's similarly named panel. Both panels make it super easy for you to plug in your computer to hook up to the TV, plug in your iPod to play through the TV, plug in your portable DVD player to play through the TV, plug in your video game console (!) to play through the TV, and well, you get the idea.
Unlike Hyatt, though, Marriott's got all the cables for free already in your room.
Geek heaven is this Plug Panel, being rolled out on the "media and entertainment center" at Hyatt Hotels. Basically, we're saying that this panel of connection possibilities is attached to the 42" HDTV and you can go wild plugging in whatever you want.
You can plug in your laptop and use that massive screen to read your emails, or practice your PowerPoint presentation if you're so inclined. You can plug in a video game system or an MP3 player or even a DVD player and you'll still have some spots left over. And it's all in easy reach so you don't have to fiddle about behind the TV in the dark ... been there, done that.
We already figured out that the Sofitel London Heathrow T5 is pretty high on the high-tech side of hotel life, what with its complicated air-conditioner controls, referred to by tech-friendlier guests as "cool gizmos".
But now there is high-tech TV as well. The Acentic Panorama system just launched in the Heathrow Sofitel and this is meant to be a mix of on-demand and interactive TV services that should probably satisfy pretty much anyone. We're usually pretty fussy about this, but it certainly doesn't sound too bad to get this:
access to 500 international satellite TV channels and up to 250 movies - all available totally on demand and with the ability to pause, fast-forward and rewind the movies.
We were thinking that an airport hotel is not the place we're going to be spending a lot of time--mostly we just want to sleep there--but since many of the rooms at the Heathrow Sofitel include a TV in the bathroom, there's plenty of chance to watch the latest movie right to the end. Useful for some but not all, that's our final judgment.
Oh, good. We could go on for days about how crucial we feel free, consistent Internet connections at our hotels to be -- and how much it sucks when there is no Internet connection at all -- but now maybe we might be a little bit more hesitant to use said free, consistent Internet connections. Well, a little more hesitant to send our top-secret, insider-y earthshattering hotel gossip over those networks, anyway.
A new study out of the Cornell School of Hotel Administration (this editor's alma mater, holla back!) found, after an analysis of 46 hotels and a survey of 147 hotels, that a majority of properties do not use all available tools to maintain network security.
Their survey found that about 20 percent of the 147 hotels surveyed still use simple hub-type systems, which are most vulnerable to hacking. In the first-hand analysis, the study tested the networks of 46 hotels, often without actually being guests of the hotel.
Oh, great. You can check out a full version of the report here. Til then, we'll make sure we use secure-for-sure connections to send each other our Jason Pomeranc gossip.
In the mood for a little time travel? We've just read about the future of hotels with some predictions for 2020 from Jitendra Jain, an e-commerce manager with Starwood Hotels.
Jain tells us what the hotel guest (that's us) of 2020 will probably want and get, and it makes for interesting reading. One especially neat thought was that extravagant hotel advertising will have gone out the window and we will all be picking our hotels based on recommendations of our trusted networks (which, by the sound of it, includes a lot of internet friends too). He says, "citizen reporting and livecasting is the order of the day."
We're not intense germophobes or anything, but we really, really prefer to not see evidence of any prior guests in our hotel room when we check in. We've heard the horror stories and seen all those nightly news specials with the black lights and the body fluid, certainly; but we prefer not to think about it.
Plus, we like to think we know enough about hotels to stay away from the potentially seedy spots or the brands that are notoriously lax on the cleaning.
Still, the tech-savvy smartyfaces over at Gizmodo have put together a list of ten gadgets to you can bring with you if you are dead-set on protecting yourself from any sort of hotel-borne germy-germs.
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by juliana
