With its pulsing streets and wild, cloud-splitting skyline, Shanghai has a reputation as the metropolis on the edge. And walking into the new Park Hyatt hotel here feels like time travel. Through the door at the Shanghai World Financial Center - a 101-storey skyscraper with 20,000 inhabitants - is a nearly empty vestibule: A sole concierge awaits you before a massive abstract mural. From there, it's an ear-popping elevator ride 87 floors up.
Here, the open lobby by designer Tony Chi is based on the communal plan of a traditional Chinese home; Shanghainese young Turks hang out and network above the Lilliputian skyline. And in the rooms above, discreet technology is everywhere. Lights glide on as if awakening from sleep instead of snapping open with a mechanical pop, and one simple remote controls all media.
Welcome to the hotel of the future: Connected to the city and culture around it, built with the latest and simplest technology, and full of inviting public spaces. These ideas are emerging as hotels everywhere, from indie boutiques to multinational chains, experiment with ways to attract a new generation.
Joseph McInerney, head of the American Hotel and Lodging Association, says hotels have learned that the priorities of younger travellers are quite different from their baby-boomer elders: "They want things modern, sleek, high-tech," he says. Along with a smaller environmental footprint and better-integrated technology, they're demanding public spaces where they can mix work with a lively social scene. It's a demographic shift triggering profound changes in the design, the service and even the scent of tomorrow's hotels.
CHECK-IN
In the most innovative hotels, getting checked in is no longer the ritual it used to be. At the Shanghai Park Hyatt, after the long trip upstairs, you are whisked straight to your room - where a butler awaits to help unpack. ID and credit-card formalities are painless and quick, performed while a hotel assistant helps plug in your laptop and a housekeeper brews green tea.
A few hotel properties are going a step further, completely rethinking the hotel's entry portal. Element Hotels, the new eco-conscious extended-stay properties from the Starwood chain, are installing "smart kiosks" akin to those at airports so guests can check in or out, confirm or upgrade rooms, create keys or print boarding passes on their own.
North America's first Shangri-La hotel, opening in Vancouver on Jan. 24, has eliminated the front desk entirely: Instead of a check-in area, guests are greeted by an atmospheric "arrival experience." Candles flicker amid a thicket of bamboo, while the sounds of rustling grass and the chirp of crickets create a peaceful transition.
CULTURAL CONNECTIONS
Yet the most profound difference in tomorrow's hotels may have less to do with the senses than with the psyche. Many new lodgings see themselves not as anonymous way stations but as gathering spots for like-minded souls. Guests are increasingly "self-assured yet unpretentious," says hotelier Brad Wilson, chief operating officer of the Denihan Hospitality Group.
"The formal 'white glove service' definition of luxury is being rejected in favour of a sense of belonging." What really matters, he says, "is feeling like you're part of a community during your stay."
There's a similar movement in Amsterdam where the boutique Lloyd Hotel, whose room rates range from $168 to $756, attracts arty types at every economic level with its "Cultural Embassy," which connects guests to the city's avant-garde music and art scene.
This new tendency toward the social is recasting the hotel lobby into something akin to its forebear of the 19th century, an era that coined the term "lobbyists" to describe deal-makers haunting the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C.
