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Lose the Chocolates, Keep the Phones
The Travel Critic · June 7, 2000

The knock on my door at the Tampa Marriott Waterside couldn't have come at a worse time. I was on the losing end of an argument with an editor on my cell phone, and despite having a room on the 20th floor, my signal kept fading.

"I'm here to turn your bed down," the voice in the hallway interrupted.

"That's OK," I answered. "I can handle that myself."

Seconds later I heard another knock - this time, more insistent. I walked to the door, which almost made me lose the wireless call, and opened it. A hotel associate stood there, two wrapped chocolates in her hand, a look of resignation on her face.

"At least take these," she said.

Turndown service in general - and chocolates on the pillow in particular - is a hotel amenity that I just don't get. Neither does William Petersen, who runs New Hampshire College's division of hospitality administration.

"Mom may have tucked you in at night," he says, "but she would have never fed you caffeine or sugar at bedtime."

Tell me about it. Those little turndown chocolates are loaded with enough stimulants to keep you awake for hours. A single ounce of semisweet dark chocolate, for example, can contain up to 35 milligrams of caffeine, which is a good start if you're conducting sleep-deprivation experiments.

Last week, I suggested what should be removed from the aircraft cabin; this week, as promised, I'm taking a similarly hard look at the hotel room.

What should the hospitality business do away with in its rooms?

The beds, says Chekitan Dev, an associate professor of marketing at Cornell University's school of hotel administration. "Most hotels need more comfortable mattresses," he notes. "They also need to do away with bedspreads and stop the practice of tightly tucking the sheets in the corners as they do in hospitals. They give the guests tendinitis."

The Westin hotel chain seems to be taking a cue from the good professor. Its "Heavenly" beds come with a custom mattress, three heavy sheets, a down blanket and comforter and five (count 'em, five) pillows. But when I slept in one of these beds not so long ago I ended up throwing half the sleeping amenities out. I couldn't find any room for myself.

Tom Nau thinks trinkets like shampoo, conditioner and shoe mitts are relics of the past. The vice president for Shiner Hotel Group, which owns a string of Marriott and Holiday Inn franchises, Nau says some of the amenities won't do a disappearing act just yet. But, he adds, "People don't care if they have a sewing kit or shower cap."

Instead, Nau says, hotel guests are demanding two-line phones with voice mail -- "preferably with a speaker function" - plus desktop or tabletop data ports and high-speed Internet access.

Judging by the e-mail I get, I would have to agree - to a point. Customers want these services to cost the same that the sewing kit did. In other words, they want it for free.

Another hotel fixture that's checking out is the comment card, and that's not just because fewer than 1 percent of guests bother to fill one out, says Ed Rubinstein, who edits Hospitality Technology magazine.

"The comment card is being incorporated into the television sets," he explains. The newer, high-tech TVs let you play video games, select a premium movie, access the Web or get polled on your hotel experience.

There's no word yet on whether the electronic comment cards are more popular than their dead-wood counterparts. But I'll bet if the hotel threw in a free movie, a few extra airline miles or 20 minutes on the in-room Nintendo, you'd see the response rate go through the roof.

What else is obsolete?

• Fruit baskets. They're more of a guilt trip than an amenity, because they remind you that while you're on the road, you're generally eating meals laced with enough cholesterol to stop an elephant's heart. "Besides," says Kitt Vidnovic, a concierge at the Monarch Hotel in Washington, "nobody can eat all the fruit in them, anyway."
  
  
• Vibrating beds. I just couldn't resist mentioning them. Patrick Gallagher, a vice president at Pacific Direct, which supplies toiletry items to hotels, says even though the coin-operated beds have all but vanished from most hotels, "you can still find them in some low-end properties." Say it with me: "Vibrating beds are bad."
  
  
• Luggage service. Those bags on wheels have rendered the bellman all but useless, to hear people like Camille Lawrence talk. "It's very unpopular, even though our building is three stories high and there is no elevator," says Lawrence, manager of the First Colony Inn in Nags Head, North Carolina.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.