A hotel room filled with high-tech gadgets, flat-screen televisions with fancy remotes and wireless service for the laptop might be just the thing for the iPod-carrying, Blackberry-texting traveler. But not all guests are quite so comfortable with technology, and hotel operators need to ensure that the experience they’re delivering meshes with the guest demographic.

That was the message from Stephani Robson during a panel discussion, “The Hotel Room of the Future,” at the recent 2008 Gaming Technology Summit in Las Vegas.

Overdo it with 21st century bells and whistles and you risk alienating good customers, she warns.

Robson, a senior lecturer at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, uses herself as an example. “I am a late adopter. I just got my first cell phone four weeks ago. I am a weirdo. But I represent a lot of your guests.”

Robson’s area of research is “guest psychology,” particularly as this relates to how the hotel room environment is experienced on an individual level, and she points to the iPod as typical of a technology that pushes all the right buttons

 “Perhaps the most important thing about the iPod isn’t its intuitive design or its sexiness; it’s the fact that it’s more self-expression,” she said.

In fact, she suggests, if you ask people about what kind of MP3 player they have, “Generally they’ll say, ‘I have an iPod,’ because an iPod is a strong brand that says something about who these people say they are or would like to be. And these things together, this combination of intuitiveness, of customization and this connection to self-identity or brand are three things as hotel designers we need to think about.”

Guest psychology, she explains, is driven by the amount of outside stimulation coming the way of the customer.

“What we’re trying to do with a hotel room is find that sweet spot of arousal,” she said. “Generally, when guests are in the room they’re not looking to get excited about things. They’re generally there for relaxation purposes or they’re preparing something for a presentation. They like engaging in some kind of entertainment, but generally the guest room is supposed to be a relatively calming environment.”

As an example she showed a slide of a hotel room in Berlin that used bright colors, put the bed in the middle of the room and surrounded it with a moat, the idea being that you’re sleeping in a “castle”.

“What it’s doing is, it’s increasing the stimulation, but what it makes people feel is a little less comfortable about their experience,” she said. Guests generally prefer their bed against a wall. “This idea of playing around with the floor plan of the room and putting the bed in the middle, although it’s sexy and cool and interesting, guests don’t like it because there’s this feeling of exposure.”

Playing around with the “arousal factor” to get an effect is fine, she says. But there are other factors to keep in mind, including how much control a guest has over the environment.

Room with a hue

The latest at MGM Grand’s Skylofts — a ‘digital’ peephole developed by First View Security.

At London’s Phillipe Starck-designed St. Martins Lane Hotel, owned and operated by Morgans Hotel Group, guests can change the ambient color of their rooms.

“The idea behind that is not to produce any kind of effect other than strictly an emotional one,” Robson said. “What that is doing is putting the guest in control of their environment. And we’ve been doing this a long time in hotels … playing with thermostats, playing with lighting, playing with other kinds of technology in the space. The more you can give to your guest, the happier they will be.”

Control, she noted, doesn’t mean offering more complexities for guests but giving them something they can master. Hotel operators need to keep in mind that guests may have had a trying experience just traveling to the property.

“So here’s your guest arriving at your property. They’re stressed. They’re fatigued. They may be uncertain about how to find their way around your property. With that high stress level people’s need for control over their experience increases. So if you introduce a guest room with lots of bells and whistles and dials and stuff that you may think is really cool, remember your guest may not necessarily want that level of lack of control, at least early on.”

She points to research that shows that guests perceive design as a direct signal about the service quality of their entire experience, so the photos they’re seeing on Travelocity or Expedia may have a bearing on their view of your hotel. They also are looking to find out whether the hotel is a good match for them. That means the design of the room needs to match the audience you’re targeting.

“Where we stay says a lot about who we are,” Robson said. “The design of the space is communicating with your guest about this idea of ‘fit.’” Another wise design step is to make technology available — but optional.

 “The guest room is no longer this fixed zone. It’s actually this fluid space that the guests are going to use as they want to.”

Courtyard by Marriott, for instance, has added more public space because younger business travelers prefer that shared space to the guest room. “They’re happy to be working on their Blackberry or laptop in the public space,” Robson said. “It’s worth thinking about how this lower end of the market is changing. I think there’s a lot to learn from that.”

The session also offered a glimpse at some of the out-of-the-box trends in hotel design — including mobile pod hotels, an undersea hotel, and hotels that float in the air or in space — courtesy of architect James Balding, associate vice president of WimberlyLabs, WATG.

“These are new experiences we’re paying attention to, and we’re not too far from being able to do them,” he said.

Robotic butlers, “botlers,” as he calls them, may be coming in the near future.

“It can show you to your room, carry your luggage, and go get your room service,” he said.

A bit closer to reality is the use of one smart card to make all your reservations and serve as hotel room key and everything in between.

And, of course, hotels need to ensure the technology within a room interfaces with the guest’s portable technology.

“I want my stuff to talk to your stuff,” as Balding put it.

He related a recent stay at a four-and-a-half-star hotel in Boston and discovered no way to connect his iPod to the radio in his room. “There was not a phone jack, there wasn’t even a headphone jack. My expectation as a borderline Boomer was that should have been there.”