Mark Harpin, a San Diego-based Google executive, visits the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters a dozen times a year. He always stays at the nearby Shashi Hotel, where he preprograms his guest room to feel more at home. From the hotel’s app, he books the same third-floor room that gets just the right amount of morning sunlight. When he arrives, a goofy photo of his wife and seven-year old daughter making faces is displayed on the flat screen TV. Harpin presets the room temperature for a cool 65 degrees. He selects calming new age music to greet him.
All the room’s lights are a shade of pink, the same color scheme as his daughter’s bedroom. Harpin usually prefers a late-afternoon check out, which he can reserve up to a month in
advance of his check-in. “This is the polar opposite of your typical antiseptic hotel room,” he said. “I’m kind of surprised more hotels don’t do it.”
The lodging industry has been notoriously resistant to change, especially when it comes to the confines of the standard guest room. Many properties still consist of stacks of nearly identical 325 square-foot or so boxes, all with the same sort of furniture, wall decorations, lighting and other fixtures. Dipesh Gupta, the majority owner of Shashi Hotel with his brother, is betting that regular business travelers crave something more tailored to their personal tastes. It’s what he calls the Living Room in a Box. The product is still in beta testing at his 200-room property in Mountain View, Calif., and Gupta said he is rolling it out in another Silicon valley hotel later this month. But he already has plans to market what he calls Shashi.ai, which he developed over four years, to independent hotel owners throughout the U.S.
Because it’s app-based, all a hotel needs is a good Wi-Fi system. There’s no need to break through walls or make other major changes to a guest room for the product to operate. As Gupta sees it, most hotel guests already rely on phone apps for everyday tasks, from ordering food to renewing a prescription. Why shouldn’t they be able to contour their hotel room to their own tastes and preferences from the same device? The 50-year old chief executive of Shashi Group owns five hotels in northern California but is hardly a familiar face in the lodging industry. An engineer by training from India, Gupta got into the business after noticing, to his bewilderment, the scarcity of Silicon Valley area hotels
that cater to business travelers. While several of the big hotel chains offer some app-related features, like mobile phone room check-in or room service, hotel analysts scratch their heads trying to think of any other operator that offers Shashi’s level of personalization. Still, many are skeptical that there will be widespread demand for this concept. Savvy travelers still think you have a better chance for a room upgrade or other perks if you talk to an actual person, said Ryan Mann, a partner in the Travel, Logistics & Infrastructure Practice at McKinsey & Co.
Convincing hotel owners to adopt new technologies can also be a challenge. They have to see a clear path to a return on the investment, he added. “There has always been a place and demand for tech at the cutting edge, especially in a place like Mountain View,” Mann said. “It won’t be the norm or go mainstream.” Gupta agrees that tech employees have been the early adopters. But he maintains that anyone who uses an app for an airline boarding pass or to order a ride on Uber will quickly become comfortable with the process. And hotel owners, he adds, can install his product for $2,000 per room, or less, depending on whether the flat screen TV is relatively new. What’s more, the system can be updated with the latest software download, as with iPhone or Tesla, and kept current over the Cloud. “Every hotel on our platform stays current,” he said.