Drink up, business travelers: Minibar is on way out
a Twitter post in 2015 meant to mobilize his “fellow desk-loving Marriott patrons.” Sometimes, Schlappig said, “there’s not even a functional work space, like a table and a comfortable rolling chair, with proper space to put your laptop.”
Closets, too, are being eliminated in favor of hanging racks, he said. “Or sometimes, there’s no place to hang your clothes at all.”
Still, millennials — even extroverted ones who have earned that generation its reputation for valuing get-out-of-your-roomand-explore experiences — may not be to blame for rooms that have started feeling more spaceage than familiar.
According to Michael Suomi, principal and vice president for interior design at Stonehill & Taylor, an architectural firm in New York that works with Marriott, Hyatt and other hotel brands, the changes are aimed at keeping pace with the changing needs of all business travelers.
“Since the advent of the iPhone and the iPad, how business travelers interact with their spaces has changed significantly,” Suomi said. “In the past, people would travel with briefcases full of documents. They needed a lot more space to work, and they’d have to go down to the business center and print things out and fax it to somebody.”
Those days are long gone, he said. So, too, are most trips that last longer than a day or two because of technological changes, including online meeting tools like WebEx.
“Changes in technology have changed the expectations of what a traveler needs in a hotel,” Suomi said. As a result, rooms are being redesigned at a record pace, often every six months, he said.
The lack of closets in new chains like Moxy, a Marriott spinoff now open in New Orleans and Tempe, Arizona, reflects research showing that guests often do not bother to unpack anymore, said Suomi, who designed the New Orleans hotel. The bureau-less rooms also demonstrate that dresser drawers are now seen as liabilities. “They’re just one more place for a guest to leave something behind and then the hotel has to send it to them.”
But there is another reason closets are becoming scarce at niche brands like Moxy, whose average room rate is $244 a night, and Vib, an ultramodern offshoot of Best Western that will open its first three locations this year in New York, Chicago and Springfield, Missouri.
“A room can start to feel pretty small when you put a closet and a dresser in,” said Ron Pohl, the chief operations officer and senior vice president for Best Western.
But the feeling of smallness in modern guest rooms may be less the fault of closets than of the fact that they are actually shrinking. Guest rooms that were 350 square feet five years ago at what Suomi called the big three business hotels, Regency, Hilton and Marriott, are now often 275 square feet, he said. That, too, is a response to evidence that time is mostly spent elsewhere. Guest rooms at the new boutique hotels like Moxy and Vib are even smaller, he said, averaging about 200 square feet.
That leaves little space for traditional furnishings. But it paves the way for designs like the one at Moxy, which encourages guests to manage their own spaces by hanging almost every piece of furniture on the wall, Shaker-style, and the one at Vib, which will offer platform beds so suitcases can be stowed underneath.