Hotels Add Libraries as Amenity to Keep Guests Inside

Reading material in many hotel rooms has become about as spare as it can be — open the desk drawer and it might hold a Gideon Bible and a Yellow Pages.

But some hotels are giving the humble book another look, as they search for ways to persuade guests, particularly younger ones, to spend more time in their lobbies and bars. They are increasingly stocking books in a central location, designating book suites or playing host to author readings. While the trend began at boutique hotels like the Library Hotel in New York, the Heathman Hotel in Portland, Ore., and the Study at Yale in New Haven, it is expanding to chain hotels.

For these chains, a library — or at least the feel of one — allows a lobby to evolve from a formal space to a more homelike atmosphere, one that younger customers seek. Adam Weissenberg, vice chairman for the travel, hospitality and leisure groups at Deloitte, said, “My general impression is that this ties into changing demographics.” He added, “Younger travelers want to be part of the community.”

As with any other change in a hotel, there is a financial angle. Room revenue in hotels rose 6.3 percent in 2012 compared with a year earlier, but food and beverage revenue increased only 2.3 percent, according to PKF Hospitality Research Trends.

For hotels, the challenge is to persuade guests to spend more time, and money, in restaurants and bars, rather than venturing outside.

The Indigo Atlanta-Midtown hotel, for example, has a separate space in the lobby it calls the Library, with books, newspapers and coffee. The Indigo Nashville Hotel also has a library-style seating area.

Country Inns and Suites, with 447 hotels, now has an exclusive arrangement with Penguin Random, called Read It and Return Lending Library, that allows guests to borrow a book and return it to another location during a subsequent stay.

Scott Mayer, a senior vice president at Country Inns, says the goal is to provide guests, 40 percent of whom are business travelers, with “something they didn’t expect.”

Since early July (a version of the program was begun in 2001) the hotel chain has offered novels by Dean Koontz and Steve Berry and other Random House authors, as well as children’s books. A corporate blog contains an excerpt from Mr. Koontz’s March release, “Deeply Odd.” The circulating books for both authors will be from the backlist.

Mr. Berry is enthusiastic about a new outlet for his work. He called it “the easiest, most efficient, carefree way to put books into the hands of readers.”

In June, the Hyatt Magnificent Mile in Chicago completed a renovation that includes a bar stocked with books and magazines and a small number of computers.

Marc Hoffman, the chief operating officer of Sunstone Hotel Investors, which owns the hotel, says he has also brought the library concept to Sunstone’s other hotels, including the Renaissance Washington, D.C., Downtown Hotel which has books about presidents and sports; the Newport Regency Beach Hyatt; and the Boston Marriott Long Wharf, where he says books about the Boston Celtics, fishing and baseball are popular.

“We’re creating spaces people can relax in,” he said.

Bookstores and Web sites supplying hotels report an uptick in business. The Strand bookstore in New York, for example, sells books to the Library Hotel and the Study at Yale, as well as to hotels in Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, and Philadelphia, among others. Jenny McKibben, who coordinates the store’s corporate accounts, estimates that 60 percent of corporate business stems from hotels or design firms working for hotels.

Before the recession, she said, 15 to 20 hotels a year would call to order books. Now, with increased guest interest and newer technology that allows hotels to review pictures and title lists, the number of hotels ordering has increased to about 40 annually. “It’s a new luxury item,” she said of books.

Meanwhile the boutique hotels are personalizing a library-like experience even more.

At the Library Hotel in New York, where individual floors are assigned numbers from the Dewey decimal system and rooms have books within that classification, the hotel ran a haiku contest in April to celebrate National Poetry Month.

Steven Perles, an international lawyer practicing in Washington and a frequent guest, didn’t participate in the contest, but during a recent stay he considered his choice of the hotel. “Books are so much part of the appeal,” he said, although on an earlier trip he said he stayed in a room designated for Slavic languages and couldn’t understand any of them. Still, he gives the hotel high marks for its service.

Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., supplies books to the Heathman Hotel in that city. Authors appearing at the bookstore or nearby Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, who stay at the hotel, go through a ritual of signing their most recent work to add to the hotel’s collection. The hotel has nearly 2,100 books signed by authors including works by Saul Bellow, Stephen King and Greg Mortenson. Guests have access to the library each evening.

Some hotels are staging author readings. Ahead of President Obama’s second inauguration, Lewis Lapham, editor of Lapham Quarterly and former editor of Harper’s Magazine, read excerpts from “A Presidential Miscellany,” a book he wrote, at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington.

The Algonquin Hotel in New York is looking to build on its rich literary history with a suite stocked with books from Simon & Schuster.

On a recent evening, more than 125 people gathered in the hotel’s main lobby to hear Chuck Klosterman, the author, essayist and columnist on ethics for The New York Times, read from his latest work, “I Wear the Black Hat,” published by Simon & Schuster.

Mr. Hoffman said that hotel books could become a souvenir. He says every book is stamped with the hotel name. And he concedes that some guests may take them home.

“We hope they remember the trip, remember the good times and go back again,” he said.

Itineraries: Hotels Look to Stand Out in a Sea of Uniformity

At the Wyndham Grand Orlando hotel in Florida, meals are created with some of the latest culinary technologies, including anti-griddles, liquid nitrogen tanks and Pacojets. Guests at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara are trying out a new booth for soundproof worldwide teleconferencing. If these new features go over well with customers, they will stay.

The new offerings are part of a push among hotel companies to speed up the innovation process and to foster new ideas at the local level by testing them on-site and receiving quick feedback from customers.

“In the past, hotels would develop the new idea at headquarters using focus groups and research, and then roll it out,” said Berkita S. Bradford, assistant professor of hospitality and tourism management at St. John's University. “Now, they go right to their guests” to get the immediate feedback they can use to continue, modify or cancel the project.

On-site testing of new ideas is also happening on a hotel-by-hotel basis, as hospitality companies across the price spectrum encourage individual locations to express themselves and offer a local difference to their guests, said Steven A. Carvell, associate dean for academic affairs at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration.

Until recently, the goal of a chain hotel was to deliver a consistent level of service that varied little, according to Jeff Semenchuk, Hyatt Hotels’ chief of innovation, so customers anywhere around the world knew what to expect. Procedures were dictated from the top and checklists were the focus, “but now there is a sameness across the industry,” he said, and some hotel operators and executives are looking for new ways to make their hotels stand out. “We’ve begun to ask managers to think about the experiences they want guests to have, not if they have the right amount of chairs in the conference room,” he said.

About a year ago, Hyatt Hotels started using nine of its hotels around the world as lab hotels, experimenting with new concepts and prototypes. Now Hyatt is encouraging local managers around the world to examine their customer feedback and test new ideas.

This has been a paradigm shift, Mr. Semenchuk said. “A year ago we didn’t talk about failure,” he said, but now, “we tell them fail fast, fail cheap and learn from it. Take a week, illustrate a concept, and try it.” Managers, he said, should share what they have learned and move on. Other hotel companies, like La Quinta, AKA and Affinia, are giving more latitude to local managers as well.

Many changes, of course, still come from the top, using broad-based data and cost analysis, because introducing something new can be expensive, Dr. Carvell said.

Managers at La Quinta Inns & Suites, a nationwide chain, saw that customer satisfaction scores on their free breakfast were the lowest among all its surveyed topics and lower than their competitors’ scores. The managers zeroed in on the two most common breakfast complaints, that there weren’t enough healthy choices and that guests had a hard time finding what they wanted. After testing different layouts and surveying guests, they found that by displaying the healthy foods they already offered more prominently, breakfast scores and overall satisfaction rose. “The answer was better organization and new signs,” said Julie Cary, who oversees marketing for La Quinta, adding that it was much easier to change than expanding kitchen facilities or offering a wider variety of products.

New ideas can change significantly from drawing board to final offering. Last year, for example, Hyatt tried expanding its replacement and loaner services for guests who needed items like chargers or toiletries, by creating a test kiosk in a hotel lobby to supply guests with forgotten items. They soon found that guests were stocking up on supplies, rather than taking just what they needed for an overnight stay, and some of the female guests told workers they were embarrassed to take personal hygiene items in a public setting. The hotel manager called the other lab sites that were about to start similar test kiosks and told them to halt construction.

More Business Travelers Stay With Friends Instead of in Hotels

Under pressure to hold down costs, some business travelers are finding that the best way to save on a hotel is not to stay in one at all.

Instead, they are staying in the homes and apartments of friends and relatives when they have to go out of town.

The savings can be substantial. Andrew Schrage, founder of the financial advice Web site Money Crashers, said in an e-mail that the amount “depends on the city, but one can save more than $100 per day when you factor in lodging, food and transportation.” He added, “Once I realized how much money can be saved by staying with friends or family, it’s always my first choice whenever the opportunity is available.”

Mr. Schrage, 26, has even built the savings into bonuses for his staff. “If they chose to stay with a friend, family member or co-worker, we calculate what the lodging would have cost and issue them a cash bonus of 30 percent of that amount,” he said.

Betsy Flanagan, a social media specialist in the San Francisco area who is vice president for student engagement at Ivy Bridge College, a subsidiary of the online educational program Altius Education, said she thought she had saved “$1,000 to $3,000 a year over the past few years” by staying with friends and family, or “maybe a little bit more.”

One of her biggest savings came in 2007, when she attended the five-day PodCamp new media conference in New York. The conference’s host hotel cost $300 a night. She stayed instead with a former college roommate in Connecticut — an hour’s train ride, $20 round-trip, from Manhattan. “It was worth it for me for the cost,” she said, adding that she enjoyed the side benefit of visiting a friend, but “it wasn’t as easy as staying in the conference hotel.”

Ms. Flanagan said staying with friends was part of a larger savings strategy. “I am also very frugal with buying airfare,” she said. She will buy plane tickets a year in advance if she can, she said, and she has tried to get free conference badges by volunteering.

The payoff was more than simply saving on a particular trip. By being careful with her spending, Ms. Flanagan could afford “to go to conferences and learn things and therefore change my career,” she said.

Entrepreneurs said that saving on travel allowed them to use their money more effectively when their businesses were in the fragile, early stages. Shannon Payette Seip, co-founder of Bean Sprouts, a line of cafes, products, books and television shows focusing on healthy eating for children, said friends had also given social support and strategic advice.

“It’s great to have cheerleaders for you and your company, but also to save money until the deals fall into place,” said Ms. Seip, 39, who lives in Madison, Wis. Also, she said, “if we were in a hotel room, it would mean lying around and doing other things, TV, vegging, instead of talking or using it as meeting time.”

Dana Humphrey, who owns Whitegate Public Relations in New York, said she used the fact that she saves money by staying with friends and family as a competitive strategy. “It is a selling point for me,” she said. When she attended a pet show in Washington, for instance, she told one of her pet product clients that “they don’t have to pay for me to stay there, because I have friends in D.C.”

Ms. Humphrey, 29, added that she enjoyed the social aspect of seeing her friends on business trips. “My whole point is to get on these trips to visit friends,” she said.

But the stays are not always trouble-free. Ms. Humphrey said she could work “anywhere as long as I have a cellphone and Internet.” But that can be a challenge when friends have bad Internet connections.

“I am a demanding guest,” she said. “I don’t just want to be here for free. I want the Internet when I arrive.”

Some travelers said they used the Internet to find free or inexpensive places to stay. They search on Craigslist, as well as on paying sites like AirBnB, which allows people to rent apartments or rooms inexpensively, and CouchSurfing.com.

In an e-mail, Ms. Humphrey said that she had used CouchSurfing, “mainly with my sister,” but that she would not use it for a business trip. “Usually CouchSurfers are very open-minded and cool,” she said.

When staying with friends or family, boundary issues are to be expected. Mr. Schrage, the Money Crashers founder, said he had encountered “privacy issues when staying with friends or having them stay with me, more so than when I stay with family members.” With relatives, he said, “rules regarding privacy and boundaries are generally understood.”

William D. Pitney, 43, a financial planner in the San Francisco area, said he often stayed with relatives or friends when traveling. To avoid potential tensions, he recommended that business travelers “set the boundaries before you get into the situation.” He said travelers should ask several questions, including, “How close are you to the relative or friend?” and, “If you approve me staying there, do we have to hang out? What do you expect?”

Additionally, he said, “When it comes to friends, I have to know their spouse and that the spouse approves.”

Mr. Pitney and others also suggested helping with household chores and buying groceries. “If by staying with a friend, I saved $800 to $1,500, from this to pay $100 for the food bill, I am still saving $700 to $1,400,” he said. He and other travelers also said they took their hosts to dinner as a thank-you.

Sometimes, the small size of friends’ apartments can be problematic. Ms. Seip, the Bean Sprouts entrepreneur, said that in 2010, she and her business partner, Kelly Parthen, 40, “cramped into a one-bedroom apartment in New York the night before our ‘Good Morning America’ taping.” Her host family, she said, “had a dog, our friend was pregnant and there were baby shower gifts all over the place.” Excited about the show the next morning, their friends also wanted to talk, though the two visitors preferred sleeping.

The two also had a fear that would not arise in a hotel. In addition to baby gifts, Ms. Seip said, “we brought food for the dog, so the dog would not eat our props.” Starting a company, she added, “is a very strange road.”