Hospitality

The latest trends in guestrooms mostly involve taking things away.

Wall-to-wall carpet? Too hard to keep clean. Bathtubs are going bye-bye. Desks are getting ditched (although the outcry from business travelers may bring them back.) Even nightstand Bibles are getting harder to find.

But what about the hotel alarm clock? Some chains think it’s time to remove them from guest rooms too. Walt Disney World took the alarm clocks out of its hotel rooms in 2016, replacing them with power/USB charging hubs. Guests still want their clocks, however — they just want them to work a little better.

Is there any better guest than the business traveler? They stay mid-week. They have expense accounts. And it doesn't take too much to make them happy (more on that in a moment).

Hotel chains are constantly upgrading rooms to look modern and fresh. Goodbye, flowered comforters, brass lamps and pastel watercolors; hello, crisp triple-sheet bedding, extra power outlets and granite vanities.

But that's what's now; what comes next? The desires of millennial travelers are drastically altering the standards for hotel rooms and guest service.

Here are the trends and ideas that are shaping the guestroom of the future.

When a guest walks into a hotel room, she might be wowed by the decor. She might be impressed by the flat-screen TV, or the thread count of the sheets. But what she really wants is for the room to feel like home.

Hotel owners and housekeepers know that hotel rooms are often cleaner than guests' own homes. But that doesn't help allay the fears of guests who have seen one too many TV exposés on dirty hotel rooms.

In response, hotels are adopting extreme measures to calm guests' fears. In 2012, Best Western International rolled out a new cleaning program in which housekeepers use black lights to find invisible biological matter and UV-light wands to disinfect things like remotes. The new policy works, Best Western says: guest satisfaction for room cleanliness rose 12 percent. What else can a hotel do to reassure guests its rooms are clean?