<B> Computers Check In</B>
<I>Hotels Begin Offering Computers In The Guest Room</I>
By Cheryl Rosen
Two well-financed players--one hotel and one technology company--this month begin ambitious programs to bring personal computers to hotel rooms nationwide, fueling the debate over whether travelers carry laptops because they want to or because they have no choice.
Choice Hotels International Inc. this week is installing computers in 1,000 guest rooms in four hotels, and will add as many as 50,000 more by year-end. Just three weeks after installing its first SuiteLink system in a test property, Choice is clocking a 30 percent "take rate" of customers logging on to the free services, with 30 percent of those--three times the projected number--coughing up $9.95 to access high-speed business services as well.
"Even in this initial rollout, it's a pretty significant amenity already," said Choice vice president of partner services Dan Rothfeld. "I think laptops are going to phase out, and being able to access the Internet is going to become as commonplace as having access to a phone."
Meanwhile, Solar Communications Group Inc. of Millville, N.J., last month completed three weeks of testing its PCRoomLink system at the Holiday Inn in Runnemede, N.J., and last week began installations in 76 rooms at The Houstonian in Houston. Next on the delivery schedule are the Trump International and Excelsior hotels in New York, and the Admiral Fell Inn in Baltimore.
Both programs are aimed at the universe of travelers who dream of hitting the road without a laptop in tow--though no one is yet sure exactly how big that universe is, or at which price point it will become a viable market.
Both companies also are in discussions with individual corporations about linking to their internal private networks, so that travelers could access corporate servers from preferred hotels on the road. Such links might one day resolve the nagging security concerns that have kept travelers tied to laptops issued, configured and maintained by their companies.
In the here and now, Choice, envisioning its system as a hot new amenity in hospitality, is offering free computers and Internet access through its SuiteLink portal, where advertising revenues and links to other sites will help subsidize the cost. But travelers who access the system's Microsoft Office software (including Word, Excel and Power Point) or laptop connections to the T-1 line will pay $9.95 a day.
"In-room computers are a very important amenity even now, but especially looking forward, and we have every intention of being on the front end of the curve," Rothfeld said. "It provides us with the ability to tie our properties together and to brand the Internet access solution to Choice."
It also offers tempting other possibilities, like replacing the paper-menu-on-the-doorknob system for ordering room service breakfasts or--perhaps one day--downloading full folio data.
A No-cost Model For Hotels
PCRoomLink's revenue-driven price model will charge $17.95 a day, which it will share with the hotel. The cost of installing a complete system--about a $500,000 per 100 rooms, the company said--now is being underwritten by Solar's venture capital investors. But Solar has filed with the SEC to boost its capital with a stock offering.
The PCRoomLink computer monitor and keyboard, tucked neatly inside an armoire, allow travelers high-speed access to e-mail, the Internet or Microsoft Office. Travelers who register (at no cost) can download their office files onto the PCRoomLink server before hitting the road, and then access and work on them in their hotel rooms.
The new version of PCRoomLink due out on Sept. 9 will add hot links to stock, news, weather and other traveler-oriented Web sites, allowing guests to do everything from signing up for golf tee times to ordering a new shirt from Macy's. A deal to add online travel booking to the site also is in the works.
PCRoomLink's research shows that two-thirds of all travelers carry a computer. While some may find the idea of leaving the laptop at home disconcerting, Solar is betting that an increasingly older and more female traveling work force will be happy to give their backs a break as long as they still can check the 12 e-mail messages the average traveler receives every day.
Industry reaction to the in-room computer concept runs the gamut from fascination to dismay. "It's the future," said an enthusiastic Robert Daykin, T&E business manager for Europe and Africa at Halliburton Co. in England. "Laptops are expensive to purchase and maintain, and they have an unfortunate tendency to go AWOL and disappear. Here, you don't have to carry a PC and can still have access to your work and your e-mail."
Daykin was unfazed by the $17.95 price tag. In the corporate travel arena, he quipped, "Everything is negotiable, isn't it?"
But the hospitality industry, burned once or twice by large investments in technologies that never took off (think "in-room fax machines"), remains for the most part skeptical, asserting that the cost is too high and the security issues too complex.
"We think what we need is to have PCs in the hotel that we can bring up to the guest room. Our customers are already wired," said Hilton e-commerce vice president Bruce Rosenberg.
New York's Michelangelo Hotel, which began offering in-room computers three years ago, does just that. It switched from a stationary Smart Desk to one on wheels, to make it easier to match up PCs with the guests who wanted them, said general manager Michael Blackman. On any given weeknight, three of the four are apt to be in use, at $25 a day.
Still, said PricewaterhouseCoopers director of hospitality information technology Bob Bennett, "The skepticism I have is how productive travelers can be without their files, or even with having only 20 megabytes of memory to work with. It'll work for some, but I'm skeptical about the volume they're going to get unless companies allow them access to their internal networks, or move from internal to Internet-based e-mail systems."
The key to success, all agreed, surely will lie in gaining enough critical mass of computers in hotel rooms so that travelers begin to consider the possibility of not bringing their own.
"Distribution is everything," Bennett said. "If I'm a traveler going to several cities, and some have in-room computers and some don't, I'll still need to lug my laptop."
His final consensus? "It's sort of high-risk, but it's an interesting model."
For Michael Murphy, IS support services director at Carlson Hospitality Corp., security is another key issue. "As a business traveler in a very competitive world, you, the hotelier, want me to transfer 20 megabytes of my business data onto your Internet server? I don't think so," he said. "The issue of liability concerning files being infected by a virus really concerns me in this configuration. Who's responsible if data gets stolen, deleted or infected with a virus? Is the hotel indemnified against legal action in such an event?"
Instead, Murphy said, "the real 'killer application' with high-speed Internet access in the hotel guest room will be Virtual Private Networking (VPN). Right now every Fortune 1,000 company is considering or working on using VPN technology to safely and efficiently allow users to access the corporate office/infrastructure via the Internet. Using the Internet as an extension to the corporate network has great potential for reducing networking costs and enabling remote or mobile users to stay in sync."
In the meantime, though, corporations will not be happy to have travelers access their internal network "using a non-company-owned asset, that wasn't tested or certified by the company and that has an unknown level of antivirus protection or system security. The more reasonable approach, and the safest, is for guests to use their own laptop computers (with their company's security, antivirus software and VPN solution already installed by their own technology support group) and the hotel simply provide network connectivity."
But TravelTech Consulting president Norm Rose in Belmont, Calif., was more hopeful. "There's a piece of this that makes a lot of sense, as far as having equipment in the room, and a part that doesn't seem to make much sense, when we talk about transferring data to someone else's computer. This will materialize when wide-band connectivity is a lot more ubiquitous, so basically you can plug in any place with any device and get your information. We're getting there, though it's still some time away. This may not be the total solution, but it's a step in the right direction."
Indeed, results of the in-room computer trials going on this month seem positive. Bavesh Patel, owner of the Holiday Inn in Runnemede that has been testing PCRoomLink, reports no technical problems and only positive feedback from guests--including a surprisingly high percentage of first-time Web surfers from the leisure side of the house. But he is not yet charging for access.
And does he think guests will pay $17.95 when he begins charging on Oct. 1? "People are paying $9 to see an in-room movie," he said. "I think the idea of not carrying a laptop is going to catch on, and into the next millennium it will do really well.