A brilliant idea: Pre-select a specific hotel room
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In an age when airlines are toying with the idea of charging a fee for a seat assignment, it’s nice to see a hotel chain moving in the opposite direction.
Hilton’s Homewood Suites will be offering guests the opportunity to book a specific room in their hotels. You view a layout map, like the one below, and click on the room you want. No getting stuck next to the elevator again!
As USA Today’s Kitty Bean Yancey reports, the pick-your-room feature will roll out slowly:
Suite Selection will launch in phases in 2007. At first, it’ll be available only to Hilton Diamond and Gold HHonors members and only at select Homewoods. But the plan is to have all hotels online by the end of 2007 and open up the view-a-floorplan-and-choose-a-room feature to anyone who completes a profile.
It’s a great idea. And I hope other hotels follow soon. Heck, what took them so long?
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December 26th, 2006 at 9:29 am |
What took them so long? Well, it’s not clear that it’s quite as easy to implement as airplane seat reservations. Consider the following simplified example of a Hilton with just two rooms. For a given week, I reserve room 1 on Wednesday. Another traveller comes along and reserves room 2 for Tuesday. Now traveller 3 comes along and wants to book the hotel for a week. Ooops, sorry. No space. Today, hotels have the flexibility to assign people to “random” rooms to make room utilization more efficient. If people are allowed to pick a particular room, this won’t work anymore.