Hotels Lobby For Change

When Beijing’s first boutique hotel opens in July, guests of the 99-room Opposite House may not even notice the lack of a traditional lobby or the absence of a clichéd, imposing, officious front desk. They won’t be in the hotel’s public area long enough to see what’s missing.

“An assistant will take you directly from the hotel car to your room and check you in with a handheld computer” explains Brian Williams, managing director of Swire Hotels, the parent company. “There’s no need for a formal reception center because everything will be paperless and we’ll have the guest’s information before they arrive.”

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The disappearing lobby isn’t unique to Opposite House, the first hotel-management venture of the Swire Group, the Anglo-Sino behemoth with interests in everything from airlines to sugar. Hotels around the world at every price point and luxury level are rushing to refashion their sterile, stereotypical arrival halls into convivial lounges, alluring restaurants, hip cafés, mini-museums, and even comfortable, casual work centers and socializing areas. They’re pumping in music and designer scents and ripping out all of the visual cues and furnishings that once defined a hotel lobby.

Hoteliers speak persuasively about the societal and technological shifts driving them to reinvent their public areas. And you’ll hear the lobby being rapturously described as the hotel’s living room—or the lodging equivalent of the local coffee bar.

But the bottom line is, well, the bottom line: Hotels need to make money from their lobbies. “A vast lobby that generates no revenue just isn’t practical anymore,” says Welf Ebeling, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Leading Hotels, a worldwide marketing alliance of luxury hotels.

One logical way to turn lobbies into cash cows is with food-and-beverage outlets. The Wyndham Hotels chain, for example, is installing E.R.L. Cafés (for Eat, Refresh, Live) in the lobbies of its full-service hotels and resorts. The deluxe Montage Laguna Beach resort in California has a public area that emphasizes the property’s stunning vistas of the Pacific Ocean. But there’s also what managing director James Bermingham calls “a great room in an elegant home.” It’s decked out with Arts and Crafts-inspired decor, wooden floors, indoor and outdoor seating—and it peddles cocktails from just after breakfast until well past midnight.

At the Opposite House in Beijing, the traditional lobby space will largely be replaced by contemporary Chinese art, water features, and other architectural flourishes. But there will also be a total of five bars, restaurants, and nightclubs. “This category of hotel, a small and luxurious lifestyle property, doesn’t exist yet in Beijing,” Williams says. “It will be confusing to some people, but we’re aiming for unique—a one-off experience.”

Unique and one-off has no place at Courtyard by Marriott. The 700-hotel chain is “rooted in research, not intuition,” says Brian King, the vice president and global brand manager. But he says the chain’s research confirms other hoteliers’ intuition: The traditional lobby and its stiff transactional ambience is toast.