Hotels Going High Tech
Travelers are bringing more and more gadgets with them on the road, and hotels are noticing. I found out how the newest rooms are all tech-ed out.
Hotels do a great job at the luxury part, but when it comes to tech, many rooms are severely lacking. But thankfully that's changing.
In the past, if your hotel room had an iPod dock...consider yourself lucky! Now a standard fixture in rooms everywhere, these days hotels are trying harder to satisfy our inner geek.
Cindy O'Keefe from Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas admits they have to be cutting edge, "we have to go with what our guests do in their day to day lives, we go to the guest".
At the Cosmopolitan you're greeted with handlers holding iPads.
"You know its really cool because it's not just about checking in, if a guest maybe forgot their room keys in their room, we can verify IDs without having them go to the front desk" explains O'Keefe.
Sure, skipping long check out lines is convenient, but you might want to hang around the lobby to gaze at the uber-cool and constantly changing video columns. "Our property itself is unique" says O'Keefe.
Automated vending machines and touch screen maps make the iPad set feel at home.
Just across the street, Caesars recently opened a new tower with some of the techiest rooms in all of Vegas.
One of the biggest complaints inside hotel rooms is you can't hook up media to the TV, but Caesars is throwing that out the door. They are letting guests hook up their iPod right to the television set.
"Its actually any type of i-device, so Netflix, Skype, whatever the application allows you to connect to, you're able to do that on the TVs", explains Tommy Harris from Caesars.
Instead of calling to order food or towels, you can do it all from your tablet, or mobile phone! But, if you're not into tech, you're not left out, there's still a paper version too.
And also you can text message your check out which is convenient.
"You can text message to check in, check out, you can also text message for any special types of requests. So if you're coming from the show and you want to have extra towels in the room or if you like to set up a concierge service, they're just a text away" explains Tommy.
My tip, always pack an extra power strip because you can't ever have enough outlets to charge your stuff!