Earlier this week, I traveled from Cleveland to beautiful Panama City for the 2022 edition of the SAHIC Latin America and Caribbean conference. The entire experience was a joy, from the beautiful locale to the hotel itself — The Westin Playa Bonita Panama.
But I will point out that almost immediately after dropping my bags in my room late Sunday, I noticed something in the room that — albeit completely innocuous — screams out "dated technology" the second I see it in any hotel's room.
It is the notorious, but somehow still ubiquitous black hotel alarm lock with a 16-pin iPhone charging dock built in at the top.
To me, and I'm sure to many others, there is no piece of technology that is more emblematic of an unrealized and ill-fated tech fad than these alarm clocks. My perception of time might be wrong, especially since I've lost any sense of time through the course of the pandemic, but as I recall, these little black boxes only rolled out to hotel rooms en masse around the time that Apple announced a switch to lightning ports, thus rendering them almost immediately obsolete.
Adding insult to injury is the fact that almost no one uses the actual alarm clock anymore, anyway. It's much simpler to just set an alarm on your phone that you can't dock on that pointless little box. More often than not, it's just taking up a bedside outlet that would be better used charging one of the many devices guests bring with them on their travels.
Through my years covering the hotel industry, I've heard multiple hoteliers and tech experts point to these exact alarm clocks as the exemplar of investing in fads rather than meaningful technology, so I'm wondering what is the modern day equivalent to this?
Usually in these spaces if I looked to pose a question like that, I'd have a few examples of what I think could be the answer, but nothing jumps to mind, although there surely is something that fits the bill.
And I don't think the answer is likely something pandemic-related, because a lot of the changes made in the past couple of years were done out of short-term necessity even if they don't all have lasting power. We all know the plexiglass windows in front of the front desk aren't here to stay, but that doesn't mean they weren't the right thing to do at the time.
So I ask you dear reader, what are hoteliers sinking money into right now that is money better spent elsewhere? What is a flashy technology of the moment that will look silly and pointless in the near future?
Let me know what you think on Twitter, LinkedIn or via email.
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