Hotels Responding to Business Travelers’ Demands

PHOTO: Sheraton New Orleans Hotel's new and improved Club Lounge (courtesy: Sheraton New Orleans Hotel)

Business travelers want more these days.

In turn, some hotels are going above and beyond to accommodate and service them.

Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, for example, underwent a $50 million renovation in 2013 and invested over $1 million to upgrade its Internet and Wi-Fi network two months ago. The Canal Street hotel installed a new 250 MB fiber optic circuit, which helped triple its bandwidth. It now boasts the largest Internet capacity of any hotel in the metropolitan New Orleans region.

The Peninsula Beverly Hills is lauded for its business-friendly service, being named one of the top business hotels in the world by Travel + Leisure magazine in 2013. The five-star hotel offers free Wi-Fi, extensive meeting space (including the 6,720-square-foot Roof Garden, Pool and Restaurant), 24-hour check-in and checkout, and a top-notch transportation service where guests can order room service and read selected publications.

Also, having a 24-hour check-in and checkout service is rare enough, but guests at the Peninsula Beverly Hills are charged for just one night as long as their stay doesn’t last through the second night. So, for example, they can check in at 8 a.m. on a Friday and leave at 8 p.m. on Saturday without being charged extra. 

Jim Cook, General Manager at Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, noticed that travelers were using more and more mobile devices about a year ago. The hotel’s staff used to expect about 50-60 devices for a meeting of about 500 people. But now it’s not uncommon for there to be more devices than people, Cook said. It prompted the hotel to question, “How do we deal with the guest’s need for connectivity?”

“As we approached this, we said that this need is growing at such an exponential rate that we need to look at it from three to five years from now,” Cook said.

“We needed to handle the guests of yesterday with a laptop to guests with two or three devices,” he added. “It gets to the concept of exponential growth. Getting a speed similar to what they get at home.”

As part of its $50 million revitalization, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel also redid the design, surfaces and lighting of its extensive meeting space (more than 105,000 square feet), while renovating its lobby, its fitness center, all of its 1,100 rooms (including all 53 suites) and its Club Lounge (In fact, the hotel showcases its renovation through an interactive webpage that allows guests to swipe over images of its previous areas to unveil what it looks like now).

The Club Lounge features intimate television stations and workstations, free Wi-Fi, exclusive attendant service, a private daily breakfast and evening hors d’oeuvres.

“This is a very exciting project for us,” Cook said. “We are a large convention hotel, but we also need a space where people have an exclusive place to go. In an environment where we can interact at so many different levels, (guests) are choosing that.”

“It’s almost a hotel-in-a-hotel experience,” he added.

Predictably, the revamped Sheraton New Orleans Hotel has received a positive response from guests.

“As a 30-year-old hotel, we’re winning back customers away from the newer hotels,” Cook said.

It doesn’t surprise Cook that the added services and Internet capacity have inspired travelers to stay at Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, either.

“The folks that are on the road all the time, they know through experience that there are things that come up on the road that can be really frustrating if they can’t immediately deal with it,” he said.

And don’t expect business travelers to slow down anytime soon, either, he added.

“Not only do I think it’s going to continue, the digital age has given us more at hotels than we’ve ever had before.”

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