Hotel Labs

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How do business travelers get beyond the double doors? For starters, you have to be a Hilton HHonors Diamond V.I.P. member, which requires 28 paid stays or 60 nights a year. Then you have to be chosen. The hotel's former general manager, Barbara Bejan, used to make the selections herself. The current general manager, Maurice Casaus, delegates the task to an evening manager.

"Once they know [the lab] is here, Diamond members always ask to be placed in the University Wing," he says. "But we don't want to confirm anything. Everything is assigned the day you arrive."

Besides next-generation design schemes and amenities—the wing houses everything from a new look for Doubletree rooms to a new version of Homewood Suites, Hilton's apartmentlike extended-stay brand—there's also Room 267, Hilton's "technology room." As you might expect, it's stocked with the newest bells and whistles. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine called from Room 267 complaining that he couldn't operate the then-newfangled pod-style espresso machine. "It's complicated and challenging," Casaus says, "mostly because every possible new technology is in there and guests are sometimes overwhelmed."

Often, however, the insights Hilton gleans are more prosaic. Casaus says he recently "got an e-mail from a guest in a University Wing room that featured a new platform bed we're testing. The guest said, 'I nearly broke my shin on the platform.' So the designers figured out that they should round the edges of the platform. That's valuable intelligence for a hotel."

One of the newest rooms in the University Wing is the so-called "urban scheme" for the Hilton Garden Inn. It's all about practical trade-offs. With scaled-down furnishings, no bathtub, and a walk-in shower stall, the compact layout is destined for new properties in Europe, where Hilton Garden Inn's typical guest rooms measure 260 square feet, about a third smaller than rooms in its U.S. hotels.

Those supersecret subbasement lab rooms at Marriott's Maryland headquarters serve a similar purpose, explains spokesman John Wolf. Business travelers and other guests can visit by invitation, and there are no overnight stays allowed. But the rooms give visitors a snapshot of the future of Renaissance, Courtyard, Residence Inn, and other Marriott brands.

"You're able to reach out to your core guests and get their input on things," Wolf explains. "It helps speed new products to market."

The Fine Print…
Besides its subbasement complex, Marriott often tests new products and concepts at its nearby hotels. For example, the new lobby for the Marriott's Courtyard brand, which I mentioned in an April column, first appeared in the Courtyard in Fair Oaks, Virginia.

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