The innovative history of hotels, that vanished

For decades, maybe centuries hotels were the perfect place to showcase innovation, new technology and the lifestyle of the future. Running hot/cold water, in-room phones, elevators, in-room entertainment. These things were in hotels first. But since the digital revolution, hotels faded away from being innovators.

I wrote this on LinkedIn last week and, I wanted to revisit it here. During COVID, I spent a lot of time researching the history of hotel innovation together with TechTalk Travel, Shiji and the Hotelschool The Hague. (BTW, I also sent it out on my newsletter that I strongly recommend).

My premise for the research was, maybe during these big disruptions hotels innovated. So we looked into the wars, and so forth to see if this was true. It wasn’t. There didn’t really seem to be any correlation. But what struck me most was how, for decades and even centuries, hospitality was the global showroom for innovation.

Hotels were often the first places where people experienced electric lighting, elevators, private bathrooms, plumbing in every room, telephones, air conditioning, in-room TVs, and even minibars. They were aspirational places where guests encountered the tech they wished they could get at home. A hotel stay meant stepping into a new sort of ideal. You can download the mega-pdf of the history of hotel tech here.

But somewhere around the rise of the internet / smartphones this ended. Possibly due to the fact that a lot of the innovation was digital and not physical, and hotels are physical places. But the shift happened quite rapidly, in just just 15-20 years or so, most hotels started seeming clunky or vintage when it comes to innovation. Innovation at home started moving faster than in hotels. At home we have personalized entertainment in most rooms, subsidized TVs with our personalized streaming preferences, cheap connected speakers, voice controlled lights and plugs. A lot of the things that “the house of the future” promised became cheap commodities.

Hotels couldn’t / didn’t catch up. Our IT systems made it so complex that installing simple things like screen casting into our rooms became immensely complex. In some ways our own systems made it harder to innovate. Closed or expensive APIs. Legacy setups. Processes and “we’ve always done it like that” or other reasons.

Can hospitality become the innovation showcase again? Can hotels return to being the place where people first experience the future living ideals?

I think we can, but as the biggest shifts are happening in the digital space - we need to look at how to embed it, instead of showing it. I’ve long advocated for a new role of Experience Designers or maybe that should be a new discipline of the interior designer. But I digress.

Above I listed some of the key innovations and asked GPT to make an infographic out of it. It is quite good. But many errors (as AI tends to be). So take it with a grain of salt - but it is directionally correct. And the new ChatGPT image generator was surprisingly good at the text part of the image.