Business travelers have time on their hands, money to spend and a high comfort level with computers – ““exactly the kind of people we want to reach in the home with interactive television,’’ says Paul Hudnut, general manager of US West’s CityKey, now in about 7,000 rooms in Orlando, Fla., and the San Francisco Bay Area. For supplying these subjects, the hotels get a cut of sales (most services complete the transaction by calling the hotel room to confirm how you will pay for the roses or how many will be dining tonight). But the hotel/lab’s main purpose is to push technology on a captive audience to see what works and what doesn’t. David Callander, 35, a frequent traveler from San Diego, Calif., found the system he used in San Francisco a little slow, but thinks these interactive systems will be welcome in homes. ““The person who figures out the intermediate steps to the home will be the next Microsoft.’’ One such step: a recent test at a California Marriott showed guests liked shopping on the Information Highway, but didn’t want to navigate through too many screens to get to the goodies.
Expansion is rapid; Bell Atlantic’s InfoTravel, which now connects some Atlantans with the Hard Rock Cafe or the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, will be in 3,200 Washington, D.C., Marriott rooms come May. But some would-be competitors from the cable industry dismiss these hotel trials as little more than computer sizzle. Says Richard R. Greene of Colorado-based CableLabs, an industry research organization, ““These are just experiments that some day may wind up being on cable TV at home.’’ Or they could go the way of that other great hotel flop: the coin-operated vibrating bed, a.k.a. Magic Fingers.
