I have stayed in many different kind of hotels, really cheap to the quite expensive ones, unfortunately excluding luxorious five-star hotels. Based on all my findings, this is a description of my dream hotel.

Email Before The Arrival

I would be really happy if I would get an email from the hotel, explaining few basic details:

• How to get in to the hotel (From airport or train station etc)
• If I take the taxi, how much is should cost?
• The time for check-in?
• A hotel contact phone number with proper HTML markup and plain text, so when I call, I can just press the number on the email
• Email should be in HTML and plain text, since I might not have good network when I check my emails
• Do not put any textual information on images, even if it allows you to use the fonts you want
• Small intro about the hotel, breakfast, facilities (gym, pool, sauna)

In general, the email should contain all the information that I would normally ask during the check-in.

Check-in

By the time I get to the hotel, in most cases I am quite tired and I have zero mental energy. Don’t make me think. Don’t make me answer unnecessary questions. Give me the traveller details form. Give me all the complimentary free stuff (i.e. daily newspaper) without asking and direct me to the elevators.

Good service is context related, and in this context, the best possible service is to get me into my room as fast as possible.

The Room

Here is some things I would like to see in a hotel room:

• Wifi password clearly visible somewhere in the room — Don’t make me think and search for the password
• A safe box that can fit at least 15” laptop
• A few electric plugs that do not turn off when I remove the key card, so I can charge my laptop when I’m out of the room
• HDMI input for the TV — Using a bigger monitor with a laptop does wonders for my slouching posture
• Few hooks where to hang luggage, bags, backbags
  • I sleep better when my stuff it not laying on the floor, it’s just a habit I have, not necessary linked to the general condition of the room
• Hooks/bars where I can hang my laundry rope — The hotel room does not need to look it’s been over-engineered by a seasoned sea-captain, but few strategically placed bars where the rope can be tied for drying my clothes
  • I travel light so occasionally I want to wash few clothes in the sink, because I don’t want to pay laundry for one T-shirt
  • I would suggest place the bars/hooks in the the wc/shower room
  • A sink wash with a with a drain plug
• Put one plug near the safe box and make a small gap in the safe box door that I can run the cord into the safe box and charge my laptop when it’s inside the box

Bonus: The IoT Hotel Room

Imagine a hotel room, which tracks the temperature, CO2-levels, electricity consumption, water consumption, floor pressure and lighting levels. It would log the time how long you have spent in the room, timestamp when the electric lock was opened and closed. It would know what food I ate at the restaurant, it would log the calories and break-down of all nutritional facts. Everything you do while you are staying in the hotel.

When you check out, the hotel would email you a visualised report of your stay, with attachments of all the raw data in CSV or JSON format for the people who like visualising the data.

Since this is really personal data, the data policy should state that my personal data would be anonymised after my stay. The individual customers should not be identified from the data saved after the checkout. I also could give permission to hotel to store my data.

This would be so cool! Would this be financially viable? Maybe, if the investment doesn’t get out of hands. This equipment would not increase the star-ranking, but it would definitely make your hotel to stand out in the crowd.

This would mean more paying customers, most likely data scientists.