Executive Travel : Hotels Get ‘Smart’ With High-Tech Room Gadgetry

PHILADELPHIA — When a customer walks into a room at the Comfort Inn on Philadelphia’s waterfront, a motion detector instantly tells the thermostat to adjust the temperature.

Outfitting the hotel’s 187 rooms with devices to tell when rooms are occupied or empty isn’t just a gee-whiz extravagance: It’s a way to save big on energy costs. When the guest leaves the room, the heat or air conditioning is cut back.

In January 1995, Comfort Inn spent about $47,000, or $250 a room, to buy and install the system, a first step in introducing what the hotel industry calls smart rooms.

Each room now costs about $96 less a year to heat and cool, said Kenneth Rafferty, the hotel’s general manager. The hotel saves about $18,000 a year on energy costs and will recover its investment in about 2 1/2 years, he said.

“We’re very satisfied,” Rafferty said.

Hotel rooms that “think” are a recent development. Cost-effective and reliable systems only reached the market within the last 18 months.

“It got a bad reputation when it first started out,” said Debra Kristopson, a technology and marketing consultant to the lodging industry. “It was expensive to install and very unreliable.”

The systems are quickly becoming more than a curiosity. Most new hotels, regardless of their daily room rates, will now be built with the energy-saving devices, and many older hotels are also putting them in, she said.

“They’re becoming more and more prevalent,” Kristopson said. “You see it almost as a standard in new construction.”

The potential market could be $850 million or more in the United States based on the country’s 3.4 million hotel and motel rooms.

Just a tiny fraction, probably less than 1%, of U.S. hotels now use the systems, said Alan Gross, founder and president of Blackwood, N.J.-based Energy IQ Systems Inc., a maker of the equipment. That could rise to 50% by 2000, he said.

“We’re predicting our sales of this type of product will at least double each year for the next five years,” Gross said.

The cost, too, more than doubles when bells and whistles are added to make rooms even smarter.

Rooms fitted with the most sophisticated gadgetry can turn off lights and TVs when a guest leaves, and turn them back on when the guest returns. They can shut down the heating and air conditioning when an exterior door or window is open.

Other sensors can tell a maid if the room is occupied or not and if the minibar has been used. About 30% of hotel guests use minibars, and employees at properties without the new electronics spend time checking every minibar each day.

The systems also can lock room safes for valuables when guests step out and alert security to intruders.

The smartest setups use stored information to adjust any room in a hotel or an entire chain to the preferences of repeat guests.

A partnership of Orlando, Fla.-based Elsafe Inc. and Flecon Multi System Ltd. of Singapore sells systems with a full array of options for $500 to $600 a room. The systems, which the partners have sold to more than 100 hotels, mostly in Asia, save enough energy to pay for themselves in an average of 2 1/2 years, said sales manager Brian Grant.

Other companies selling similar products are Sulcus Computer Corp. of Greensburg, Pa., and Alerton Technologies of Redmond, Wash.

Going all out with the smartest of rooms may not be worth it. Fancy features cost a lot and don’t contribute much to energy savings, said Energy IQ’s Gross. More than 90% of the energy used in a room is consumed by heating and cooling, he said.

“There has to be an adequate payback,” Gross said.