When you walk into a hotel room, do you expect that it will know your favourite songs, your exercise routine, whether you like lots of light or very little, whether you prefer the curtains open or closed, whether you like it steamy or chilly? And do you want the room to have acted on that knowledge?
It may sound like a starry-eyed futurist's idea of a good way to waste a lot of money on stuff that won't make a bit of difference to a potential customer. But Marriott International, Inc. is betting that what sounds wild today will become customer expectation tomorrow, so some mix of smart, Internet of Things, sensed and automated (pick your term) technology will start rolling out to the company's 1.3 million rooms under management in late 2018 or early 2019.
Marriott isn't alone in this conviction: A number of hotel groups are testing similar features, software and technology. It won't be a matter of whether hotels join the digital revolution, but who does it first and best.
And a version of that far-out hotel room of the future is already working, in a banged-together mock-up in the basement of the world's largest hotel company.
Down in the windowless basement of Marriott's headquarters in Bethesda, Md., is a maze filled with room concepts. This is where Marriott is bringing to life its vision of a hotel packed with modern technology designed to make each stay feel like a customized experience.
Most of the rooms are simply mock-ups of interior-decorating ideas, but two rooms designed to push technological boundaries. One is designed to be the most blue-sky, budget-run-wild sort of concept for new-build hotels. The other is just as automated, but within the envelope of the existing technology.
For Karim Khalifa, senior vice-president of global design at Marriott, the purpose behind putting together these spaces was threefold: to explain to stakeholders and partners why those technologies might be needed; to see how guests might react; and also to figure out how to make it real outside a lab.
What Khalifa wants is to give guests automation that they don't have to ask for. That anticipates them. Automation that knows your friends from across the hall are hanging out with you and acts to keep the air in the room fresh. Automation that notices you've gotten out of bed in the middle of the night and lights a path for you to the bathroom in a gentle amber glow. Automation that orders you coffee on your way to your first appointment.
The operative phrase for what Khalifa is building might be called "passive." For one thing, the room will still work if the internet is down, or if your phone is out of battery. This is in contrast to the Hilton Group's work on smartrooms that puts the smartphone at the centre of the experience. Every hotel company is moving toward some level of automation (in 2016, one Wynn hotel in Las Vegas put an Amazon Echo smart speaker in every room, for example).
"I'm in the design group, this is a very IT-ish project, but part of it for me is, 'How do I deploy infrastructure into buildings so I can enable all this, and how do I pay for it and make this whole business model work?'" Khalifa says. A 19-year veteran of Marriott, and a mechanical engineer, his enthusiasm for this project is manifest. This is a man enjoying himself with some pretty cool toys, trying out multithousand-dollar gadgets such as "smart mirrors" that display text over your reflection and figuring out how to renovate old hotel rooms and also build brand-new ones with the latest gear.
There is, however, a dark side to a room so smart it knows what you're about to do. The kinds of sensors Marriott is planning to install are incredibly invasive from a privacy perspective.
For instance, that thing about the bed having a sensor that knows when you've gotten up? It's cool, and a real thing Khalifa built in the lab. The company can even gather sleep data with it, letting you know how long you were restful, tossing around, etc.
On the flip side: Every bed with that sensor would know how often you're on it and what you're doing.
"Is there some creep factor in that, maybe? I don't know," says Khalifa, who compares that kind of tracking to the everyday erosion of privacy by social networks, navigation apps, smart TVs, etc. "At some point, we all start to wade into these waters, where at first I'm like 'I'm not putting my toe in there.'" What changes, he says, is when the convenience factor outweighs the creepy.
It may not seem so, but sensors that can tell how many people are in the room are critical to the energy-savings goal of new technology. Khalifa is able to get those occupancy data with new electrical switches and wall sockets from French electrical-components giant Legrand that only cost a few dollars more each than standard switches and can connect to every wireless standard, from Bluetooth to Zigbee to plain-old radio frequency. There is now technology, which Marriott is employing, from startups such as Ivani, that can use radio frequency to see through walls, and set up a motion-sensing "mesh" network in a hotel room that can tell exactly how many people are in it, and where, at any given time.
"I think there's all kinds of privacy issues and things that people need to think about before we do it, but we're exploring that as a technology," Khalifa says.
The implications are terrifying and impressive. For instance, it could give hotels a tool to help combat human trafficking ( traffickers will rent one room and then cram up to a dozen people into it) or more prosaically help the hotel balance the climate control (a room of eight partying teens is going to need more fresh air than others).
The company is not opening up a can of privacy-policy worms just so guests can shout a voice command, but because there is real money to be saved in energy efficiency.
"We're estimating we can save hundreds of dollars a year in a guest room, by really accurately controlling its consumption of electricity and air conditioning," Khalifa says. For example, smart curtains can be intelligently opened or closed based on whether the sun's rays are useful (in the winter) or unhelpful (in the summer) toward the heating and cooling of the room.
"Let's say I take two or three years … maybe I have $500, $600, maybe $900 of savings. … Some of the energy savings lets me pay for features that will be guest delights."
And again, all of this is happening sooner rather than later.
"It's a very aggressive plan, it has to be deployed to 1.3 million rooms around the world. The whole kaboodle gets reset," he says. "I've got 12 months to get something in place, so that when the systems come on we can put rooms on and we can start learning very quickly what we have done really well and what we need to adjust. I would say in five or six years, you'd see big quantities installed."
The sheer scale of the challenge is part of the reason there's urgency. These days it's getting harder to go to a hotel that isn't managed by Marriott. The company is "asset-light" in that it doesn't own very many of the 6,400 properties in its portfolio of 30 hotel brands across 126 countries. And they are some of the most recognizable : Ritz-Carlton, St. Regis, Westin, Sheraton, Delta, W, Aloft and Moxy.
That structure means that Marriott has to convince the various pension funds, hedge funds and other hotel property-owners that it manages these rooms for to come along for the ride . Some of these owners might think a talking mirror is an extravagance, but Khalifa has a story about the difference between being on time with a consumer expectation versus being penalized for falling behind the times.
"There was a period about 10 years ago where everybody was reinvesting in their homes and updating them. In that cycle, sometimes they actually jumped in front of us: For a while our bathrooms looked really old," he says, and here his tone changes and he mimics the kvetching gripe of an irate customer: "'Why don't you have that in my hotel room!?! I have it at home now.'" It's a lesson, he says, that the company learned.
But the size of Marriott makes it hard to execute: "When you have a million rooms to change … it takes a while."
The writer was a guest of Marriott International. It did not review or approve this article.
The Marriott, along with a number of big hotel groups, are testing new features, software and technology as they join the digital revolution.
1. Bed sensor
It knows when you are sleeping, it knows when you're awake, maybe it knows if you've been bad or good (or if you just have to pee). Exactly how much sleep data Marriott offers is still under discussion.
2. Blinds
Automated so you can wake up to the sun if you like, also automated so that when the room is empty they will close to keep the sun out in the summer to lower cooling costs (or stay open in the winter to help with heating). When you return, the blinds reset to your preference.
3. Echo Show
Marriott hasn't landed on what kind of voice device to have in the rooms, but Echo Show could keep you up-to-date on weather, calendar, traffic and flights.
4. Wall switches
Whether you want to yell the lights on or off, the Legrand physical switches still work, with an ingenious twist: The switches revert to neutral, so the Internet of Things can still turn the light on or off no matter the last physical position of the switch.
5. Hello Marriott
The company is still figuring out how to let you know all the things you could do with voice commands. What's the best way? An in-room tutorial? A menu of commands in the guest binder, next to the takeout menus? A sign on the wall?
– Shane Dingman