Hotel Labs

Hilton Garden Inn LAX

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Though you've probably never noticed it, chances are you drive past the Hilton Garden Inn LAX in El Segundo whenever you fly into Los Angeles. Tucked away on a side street between Sepulveda Boulevard and a Green Line rail station, the generic-looking building is almost a parody of a midprice, midmarket, middle-of-nowhere airport hotel.

You're not likely to find anything out of the ordinary inside the Hilton Garden Inn LAX, either. But if you know where you're going—or you're one of the guests handpicked by the hotel's managers—you'll eventually find a corridor guarded by double doors. Down the long passage, past a series of other doorways, is the future of the 3,000 hotels and 500,000 guest rooms in the worldwide Hilton Family of lodgings.

The secret wing, code-named University, is Hilton's "hotel laboratory," the place were the company tests and refines its next generation of rooms. A year or two from now, the ideas, concepts, and furnishings that have been tried out in El Segundo will make their way into Hilton-brand hotels around the world, including Doubletree, Embassy Suites, Homewood, Hampton Inn, and, of course, Hilton and Hilton Garden Inn.

All of the big chains operate labs to develop fresh ideas, which are important in an ever-more-competitive lodging landscape. Starwood, best known for its cutting-edge Westin and W Hotels, maintains test rooms in a warehouse near its headquarters in a New York suburb. London-based InterContinental has model rooms in San Diego for its new Hotel Indigo chain. The new look of Hyatt's Summerfield Suites brand is being hammered out in a basement of the chain's Chicago headquarters. And market-leading Marriott, legendary for its research- and focus-group-driven brands, maintains its hotel laboratory deep in a sprawling subbasement of its worldwide headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland.

What sets Hilton's hotel lab apart is the fact that it's part of a working hotel, and if you're booked for a stay in El Segundo—and hold the right status in Hilton's frequent-guest program—you might get a summons to test-drive a "room of the future." (Hoteliers, by the way, hate the phrase "room of the future" because it evokes cheesy, 1960s Star Trek costumes and gimmickry.)

Opened eight years ago at the edge of Los Angeles International Airport, the hotel was designed with the 15-room University Wing as part of the property's total room inventory of 162. It's the only one of the 360 Hilton Garden Inns that Hilton Hotel Corp. owns and manages. And since Hilton headquarters is just a few miles away in Beverly Hills, designers and executives are never far from the test facilities. It also means potential hotel owners and top honchos of hotel-management companies can be shuttled over for a peek at Hilton's future.

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