Cellphones give guests the upper hand

Travel these days, from luggage to laptop, is increasingly high-tech. Yet every hotel room hosts a costly anachronism: a traditional telephone.

In-room phones once produced profits for hoteliers. Today they eat into earnings as guests use cellphones instead.

Best Western Chief Executive Officer David Kong said: "Phones used to be a revenue centre, but now they're a cost centre."

The dwindling utility of the hotel room phone is part of a wider trend that has land lines vanishing from homes and workers doing business on the BlackBerry.

AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications Inc, the big local phone companies, are losing between 10 and 12% of their lines every year to other providers, said independent telecom analyst Jeff Kagan, adding that rate would only increase.

But hotels can't hang up on their phone systems. Guest safety and security demand them, said Bjorn Hanson, a professor at New York University's Tisch Centre for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management.

"We're stuck with them," Kong said.

Applications

Guests use room phones if they need to call for help. In non emergencies, they pick up the receiver to order room service and wake-up calls.

But guests save money by using their cellphones to take or make most outside calls.

In New York City, it costs about $1.50 to make a local call from a hotel, which also might charge a fee of about $4 to connect to a long-distance carrier.

The next source of in-room revenue to vanish will be pay-per-view movies, which guests can forego for cheaper alternatives on their laptops.

Hotel companies have tried to replace the phone and continue to do so, NYU's Hanson said.

One company experimented with a handheld gadget that combined the phone's functions with lighting and climate control, Hanson said. Guests wanted it in addition to, not instead of, a dedicated phone.

Today, many big hotel chains are exploring smartphone applications guests could use to request room service and wake-up calls, Hanson said, but those efforts are very preliminary.

"It's too early to call the death of the phone," Abrahamson said.