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Hotels offer rooms
with a view and a computer geek, too
Leah Gliniewicz
Staying in a hotel and your laptop crashes? Now, room
service can bail you out.
"Hello, room service? Send up a computer tech."
Hotels are making their customers feel at home by
plugging into the World Wide Web. Business centers and rooms geared
with high-speed Internet access are springing up faster than you
can say "56K modem."
Kendra Walker, senior manager of communication for
Hilton Hotels Corp. in Beverly Hills, Calif., says 25 of its hotels
each have 200 rooms equipped with high-speed Internet hook-ups.
Their goal is to have 150 hotels equipped by the second quarter
of 2000.
Walker says they have more than 50 24-hour business
centers open in Hilton Garden Inn Hotels, and they plan on having
200 of them by the end of 2000. Business centers typically have
computers, modem and telephone adapters, copiers and fax machines
-- but the range of equipment available may vary.
With more guests carrying laptops, cell phones, and
PDAs -- personal digital assistants -- on their trips, the need
for techie know-how is greater. That's where a hotel's computer
geek comes in.
Houston, we have a problem
Some hotels have rolled out 24-hour technical support
concierge services that troubleshoot guests' snafus with laptops,
cell phones, fax machines, e-mail and computer applications.
Michael D'Anthony, a Technology Butler at Ritz-Carlton
Atlanta Downtown, sprang into action when a guest could not print
documents from a program in Japanese. D'Anthony says that knowing
the program's layout in English and doing "a little detective work"
allowed him to print it out.
"When they're on the road, they lose that link. We
want to be that link for them," D'Anthony says. The hotel averages
80 calls a month to the technical concierge.
He says one of the most common problems is people
losing or breaking their laptop's power supply, so they keep extra
adapters on hand.
Ritz-Carlton's Technology Butler program began at
its Kuala Lumpur, Indonesia, location in August 1998. The program
launched full-scale in all of its 35 locations in September 1999.
"The guests love it," says Stephanie Platt, corporate
director of communication for the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, L.L.C.
in Atlanta. "Every time I bring this up, there's a collective gasp.
"We're very customer-service driven, and this happened
to be something that was a big request."
In June, Inter-Continental Hotels and Resorts of Bass
Hotels and Resorts Inc., based in London, expanded its CyberAssist
program to its 138 locations worldwide. CyberAssist Coordinators
assist in everything from setting up a guest's computer and arranging
for repairs to providing support for word processing, spreadsheet
packages and Web browsers.
The Luxury Collection in Houston, soon to be St. Regis
of Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide Inc. is currently training
six technical support Butlers who will be available by the end of
October 1999.
"We wanted to be ahead of the game," says Robert Schofield,
general manager of the Luxury Collection.
Working the bugs out
"I think this is a wonderful idea, especially overseas
where you're dealing with strange power supplies. That would be
an enormous help," says Francie Mendelsohn, frequent traveler and
president of Summit Research Associates in Rockville, Md.
"I was in a Crowne-Plaza in Munich, and it was so
backwards. That place cried out for that expertise," she says.
"I think, generally, people who travel all the time
would not need technical support. If it's an 'off' configuration
or they're overseas, and the normal way to make connections doesn't
work, when you pull your hair out -- having somebody knowledgeable
to answer those questions that would be great," Mendelsohn says.
While hotels aren't looking to get into the technical
support business, says Charles Rutstein, an analyst with Forrester
Research Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., they do "want to make the technology
as seamless as possible."
-- Posted: Oct. 4, 1999
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