Drink up, business travellers. The mini-bar is on the way out
Do you think of hotel rooms as having spacious, old-school desks, the kind that invite long hours of working? And bureaus with a half-dozen drawers? Minibars, too? Well, perhaps you haven’t stayed at a hotel lately.
Ben Schlappig, a 26-year-old travel blogger and consultant, has spent more nights in hotels than many people will in a lifetime. So he knows firsthand about the changing design of guest rooms, and he is not completely happy about it.
“I’m a millennial, but I’m also an introvert,” said Schlappig, whose blog, One Mile at a Time, chronicles the 365 nights a year he stays in hotels. “Hotel executives are building everything around millennials right now and they expect all millennials to want to work in these hip, communal lobby spaces or in bed,” he said. “That doesn’t work for me.”
Schlappig has complained online about the disappearance of those desks, something a fellow business traveller, Yahoo sports columnist Dan Wetzel, noted in 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 favour 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 travellers.
“Since the advent of the iPhone and the iPad, how business travellers 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 centre 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 traveller 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, Ariz., reflects research showing that guests often do not bother to unpack anymore, said Suomi, who designed the New Orleans hotel. The bureauless 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 and Vib, an ultramodern offshoot of Best Western.
“A room can start to feel pretty small when you put a closet and a dresser in,” said Ron Pohl, 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.
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, Shakerstyle, and the one at Vib, which will offer platform beds so suitcases can be stowed underneath.
Stephani Robson, a senior lecturer at the Hotel School at Cornell University’s SC Johnson College of Business, said business travellers should expect to experience these kinds of design flaps as hotel chains try to figure out how their customers work.
“We’re going to see more tensions in the next few years, like with the desks, as hotels try to capture smaller and smaller slices of the market,” she said.
There are now more than 500 hotel brands divvying up those slices, she said. But that does not mean a brand has been dreamed up to suit business travellers of every preference and predilection.
For example, “as a middleaged woman, I want my closet,” Robson said. Schlappig wants to be left alone rather than herded into loungelike lobby space where he is expected to both work and mingle.
And Brian Kelly, an entrepreneur who travels 125 nights a year to help other travellers maximize their frequent flyer and credit card points through his website the Points Guy, wants his minibar back.
Robson confirmed that minibars are, in fact, becoming extinct. “They take up space and energy and they require a lot of labour to maintain,” she said.
“Confusion is a good word to use right now,” Robson said. “What I think is going to happen is, there will become a different brand for every niche, and you’ll become loyal to the brand that gives you what you want, like coffee, a closet and a desk if you’re a business traveller. But right now, with all these new brands, it’s hard for the average consumer to keep them straight.”
Should Robson’s prediction prove correct, one group of travellers who might not find a brand to latch on to are older business travellers.
“I don’t know of anyone creating a new brand that’s going after older guests,” Robson said. “Which is kind of interesting, because arguably baby boomers have the most money to spend.”
But that niche, like generation X and Y, may have already adapted to guest room design tweaks.
“Are there still business travellers like Willy Loman who go around with their Skyriter typewriters and their hard-shell Samsonite suitcases, wearing their hat with a feather sticking out?” Suomi asked.
“I don’t think that traveller still exists.”