20 20 vision

S WE near the year 2000, hotel guests have come to expect en suite baths with every room, fitness facilities (seldom used), the latest microchip technology and three-line faxes in the bedroom.

So what next? What will a hotel bedroom be like in the year 2020?

Not spaceship earth. "The ingredients are what they are: wood has to be wood, carpets have to be wool," says Ron van Pelt, principal in the London office of the US hotel architecture practice WAT&G.

Hotel interior design specialist David Bentheim agrees, dismissing all those 1960s sci-fi fantasies. "We are not going to find futuristic, fab interiors. People will still be sleeping in beds and washing in bathrooms. I really don't think it's going to be Cardin-dressed models in space-age suits and crash helmets."

The hotel market could be very different. The business traveller may well be part of what David Weifberg of Hirsch Bedner describes as "a vast, wandering middle class from Asia". That's a lot of people when you realise that he is talking about all of China and India, which alone has a middle class of something like 100 million (11% of the current population). These new travellers will be tapping into a whole range of technologies for both business and leisure.

Quite what these will be is anybody's guess. Bentheim can see his office "taken to the power of 20" to extend into the hotel room. Payment, he says, "will be handled when you check in with your smart card and they will plunder your bank account as you go along". He describes a world in which interactive television will be common and travellers will contact their family or firm by videophone. For the bored guest, adult videos are currently the most popular rentals in hotels. "You can take that over to virtual reality for the lonely business traveller," he says.

Van Pelt's vision of future technology is broadly similar. "The businessman on holiday will continue to be a businessman," he says, and the ability to link in with the office from anywhere in the world will be the key. The blurring of the distinction between work and play will be manifested in the equipment he will use. "You might be able to pick TV from any channel in any time zone anywhere in the world and be able to tap into conferences using the same equipment," he said.

Italian designer Marco Piva sees the effect of new technology as reaching further than simply changing the tools with which business is done and entertainment delivered. "The structure of the human environment will change, the structure of the city will change, there will be fewer big, complex buildings and more people networking from home."

This view is supported by Weifberg, who wonders, if businessmen will still have "the mandate to travel" in 25 years' time. Even so, he predicts that millions of maverick business travellers will continue to criss-cross the globe. Underpinning his question is an understanding of technology's role in business. He acknowledges that technologies such as videoconferencing have not fully taken hold as yet. He nonetheless considers them a cheaper and more effective way of doing business.

But he stresses that "face-to-facing" remains crucial for development of new business relationships, and these may take as long as 15 years to cement. What this means is that, as business relationships consolidate, the need to travel diminishes.

In the year 2020, as more business relationships with Asia become established, we may see the expanding market "eclipsed". It is a scenario of threatened expansion and decline, so, whether or not the eclipse occurs, hotels will be looking to develop a new customer base of older, retired people with disposable income, who like to travel. However, these people are unlikely to be using hotels designed specifically for an "international oldies set". Piva does not approve of Japanese moves towards designing exclusively for old people: "I don't think that we will be designing for special targets. All hotels will have a number of rooms able to be used by the elderly, pregnant women and big families. Design will take care of these considerations; we won't have second-category clients."

The presence of such growing numbers of older people means that amenities will evolve to suit them. Showers that are easier to use, better lighting, and perhaps voice-activated phones as standard were all mentioned by designers, and in the public areas, lift doors that close a little more slowly - people will still be using lifts.

Van Pelt suggests that "the bed will tilt like hospital beds, not a hospital bed but able to adapt to different sleeping positions". Furthermore, he is talking of the people who are today's business travellers and, as he points out, will "have high expectations and demands".

Ability to take full advantage of the services offered by hotel technology will no longer be the preserve of the business person but will be firmly in the hands of the leisure traveller as well. The guest in a hotel room will, according to Piva, be connected to information centres, part of a far bigger network than the hotel itself. He suggests that first-time visitors to a city will be able to access a museum by computer to see what it contains and better to decide what to see. He has a vision of hotels as "open gates" offering "higher levels of freedom to use the city". He predicts the hotel will take on, or perhaps regain, an important place within the community. A centre of communication and social intercourse, a place blending internationalism and localism without abandoning international quality, "a very important working place in its territory".

Weifberg points out that in some parts of the world hotels are still the centre of social and political life in cities. In Europe and the USA this is no longer the case and, in a competitive market, hotels have to offer more and more. "Family vacations, concierge services that can arrange anything - hotels will need to be special to draw in a local market."

One of the ways this will happen is that "gaming will be pervasive around the world - lamentably". There will be entertainment with and without rides and games. You might enter a hotel and find that the waiters are part of the entertainment. "The line between reality and entertainment will become increasingly blurred." It is the stuff of post-modernist nightmares, lurking out there ready to ambush you, just when you thought it was safe to enter the future.

There are compensations. Van Pelt, whose company WAT&G is experienced in building in environmentally-sensitive regions, suggests that "the unique environments will continue to be interesting". Citing Antarctica as an example he says: "my guess is that the numbers who want to visit will grow. We will have to be careful about how we protect these environments."

Building in such places will "provide scope to push new boundaries, perhaps bringing in prefab products is a very short window of opportunity, building hotels on stilts, floating them on ice, who knows?"

Weifberg predicts hotels will be located in more and more exotic locations, and has a vision of hotels underwater and vast, floating, man-made environments. He points out that we already have Phoenix World City under construction. More a floating island than a boat, because where a cruise ship will come to you, at Phoenix you have to travel to it. Weifberg is sure that by 2020 we will have witnessed the first space station tourists, though at "literally astronomical costs". It is an intriguing idea, whole artificially-created habitats floating out there somewhere.

Meanwhile, down on planet Earth, in the hotel room of 2020 the en suite bathroom will remain a standard five-fixture facility and you will still be able to recognise the furnishings. But as you lie on the bed you will have integrated and interactive systems that link you to whole worlds of information and leisure.

And maybe, just maybe, a silver-suited astronaut will float past your window - just like they said would never happen.o