How technology ruined hotels

Lighting panels you need a degree to use, TV casting that just never works – why can’t hotels get tech right?

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One of the phrases I repeat most frequently and wearily in a hotel is: “Why doesn’t it work?”
When fortunes have been spent creating a place where a one-night stay costs more than a return flight across the Atlantic, why is the in-room tech unfathomable, useless, or ridiculous? And why so much work?
If it involves downloading an app, I won’t do it. If my attention is directed to a QR code, I don’t want to scan it. I once stayed at the Nines in Portland, Oregon, and couldn’t find a switch to turn off a bright light above the minibar.
The issue was dealt with prosaically – by an engineer coming up and unscrewing the bulb. My most hated lighting situation, encountered with bizarre frequency, is when a switch on one side of the bed controls the reading light on the other, and vice versa – creating a perverse game for couples in which you must align your bedtime reading precisely.
When The Telegraph launched its Hotel Awards in September, frustration with technology was a key theme that arose in a Q&A with the head judges. One reader commented: “I shouldn’t need a master’s in computer programming to turn the lights off.” Ariela Bard, Oceania head judge, replied: “Give me a switch over an iPad any day!”
“I’m not a big user of gadgets, as I often find they don’t work or they’re too complicated when all I want to do is turn something on and off,” says Martin Brudniziki, whose impressive portfolio of interior design work includes properties for the Four Seasons, Six Senses and Rocco Forte. “I appreciate efficiency in design and technology is often, ironically, the antithesis of this.
“Instead, there could be things like surface sensor chargers in bedside tables, blue light filters and white noise machines to help you sleep.”
Lighting and shower taps are a constant annoyance, but the biggest problem for me arises when I want to kick back, lie down, and watch something at the end of the day. This simple pleasure has turned into a palaver that makes me long for the violently expensive halcyon days of pay-per-view in hotel rooms.
I asked James Grant of Airwave, a tech company that specialises in in-room TV installation – specifically Apple TV – why I have never, in all my years of staying at hotels, managed to successfully use Chromecast to play anything from my MacBook to a TV.
“There are a number of different reasons,” he tells me. “There could be more than 100 rooms and you have wires going everywhere throughout the building, Wi-Fi to worry about, plus guests can fiddle with the dongle in the back of the screen. There are incompatibility issues between certain TVs and software. The way forward is to move away from Chromecast and have apps native to the TV, so it’s the home-away-from-home experience.”
Apart from introducing Apple TV with a myriad of the apps you already use at home, there have been other recent advances in in-room entertainment tech. This year, Apple began rolling out compatibility between AirPlay and LG TVs in IHG properties in the United States and Mexico. Great, to a point – but as Grant says: “It’s a nice additional feature, but not a game changer. You could watch content from the apps on your phone, but you’re also tying up your phone while you’re doing it.”
Grant also works with the team at Roomnet, a company that sells TV solutions to hotels under the appealing tag line “to cast is in the past”.
Darren King offers his clients any make of TV they prefer and incorporates Apple’s tvOS, which has more than 23,000 apps on the Apple App Store. Whatever you use at home, you can instantly download it and log in. It’s smart, because let’s face it – no one wants to flick through the 10 or so channels live broadcasting in their hotel rooms any more.
Grant explains how any potential problems involving multiple users of the apps in any given week has been addressed: “When a guest checks out, the Apple TV is reset, logging you out of everything. While Chromecast was often unreliable, it started the revolution of people wanting to watch their own content.”
I experienced an early version of this system, which kept my hotel TV logged into Netflix when I left. The subsequent occupants of my room played havoc with my algorithm.
Other tech providers still have faith in casting from your laptop (and not being entirely beholden to Apple).
Theo Dimishky, business development director at Wifirst UK believes Google’s Chromecast and integrated Chromecast-compatible TVs are the gold standard for in-room entertainment: “We are able to address challenges that hotels have faced with Chromecast through research and development.
“Hotels have had problems with their reliance on proxy servers, which link a guest’s device with the Chromecast in their room by tagging a MAC address. And that often leads to disconnection. Hotels also need to upgrade appropriately – if you have 60 to 100 rooms you need a fibre leaded line with a minimum speed of 100 Mbps, but you could improve that [by going up to] 500 Mbps.” If you glazed over reading any of that, I’m with you. I don’t care how it works – I just want to binge-watch Broad City.
Everyone has their own system at home. Frequently the setup in my living room also feels overly complicated, as I have a projector connected to a ROKU firestick, as well as my laptop. I realised recently that my lovely new Macbook Pro can Chromecast straight to the firestick, which suggested I could live a virtually cable-free life. Except doing things this way left me with the sound slightly out of sync. I’m sure it’s fixable, but I really can’t be bothered.
I just want it to work without falling down a rabbit hole, looking for advice on Reddit. As for when I stay in a hotel, perhaps for now, I’ll just close my eyes and listen to a podcast. No one can mess that up.
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