Red Room Chronicles

I’m staying at the Courtyard Newark - University of Delaware this week.

The hotel is on the campus of the University of Delaware. They don’t have my favorite newspaper, The Wall Street Journal. The hotel is in the footprint of Cingular’s 3G network. The hotel serves complimentary coffee, which is set up just past the front desk.

Some people might consider those types of observations minutiae that really don’t make a big difference in the travel experience. Frequent business travelers would probably want to know all of those things though. Where do you go to find that info?

Sure you could come to this blog, but I could not possibly catalog a significant number of Marriott hotels on my travels alone. You would need the help of a community to get that kind of detailed feedback across a meaningful slice of the Marriott hotel brand.

Traditional travel sites like Trip Advisor and Yahoo! Travel allow users to rate hotels and write reviews. But even when you get down to the hotel level on those services the reviews are still categorized by the reviewer and not by the type of information.

I might only want to see comments about restaurants or about net connectivity. I might just be concerned about what’s in the surrounding area. If you’re a frequent traveler there may be other things that you care about.

I would want to read these sorts of observations from the people who actually stayed at the hotels, along with some commentary on the experience related to the particular category in question. I would also want to know a little bit about the person writing the observation.

Sounds like a wiki to me. A wiki or some sort of social network. A MySpace for a hotel chain? Every hotel chain should have one.

I know that hotel chains would worry about people just writing angry missives or posting general complaints. That sort of stuff can happen anytime you have an openly editable website. So how about inviting editors from amongst frequent traveler programs? Then slowly open up the editing and membership capabilities to more people. Something like that could be a perk and a privilege for those who patronize frequently and want to give back knowledge to others.

Some might say that such a venture is a risk because someone might see something about a hotel they don’t like and book elsewhere. That is true. But its also true that the most demanding customers are going to be more satisfied if their expectations are set properly before arrival.

After all, why should someone have to search all over the internet to get information that they can probably find if they just use one of the sites mentioned above or even Google?

Something like this would be a bear for any person to set up. But the Marriott hotel chain, with their significant resources and database of locations could set up the shell of the site with a comprehensive list of hotels and the placeholders for the categories. Their many customers could do the rest.

An interesting idea if I say so myself.