Now Hotels Are Really Getting Personal

Besides these standard amenities, Loews Vanderbilt Hotel might have a birthday cake waiting in your room when you arrive.

A few months ago on this blog I posed the question, “Is ‘Personalization’ the Next Big Trend in Hotels?”

The blog post laid out the vision of Starwood Hotels CEO Frits van Passchen that emerging technology would soon allow hotels to know in advance what their guests are looking for and like — much as Amazon.com, Facebook, and, as I recently wrote about, Pandora, the internet music service, know about their customers through mining their vast data banks.

It turns out that several luxury hotels are already using social media to do just that.

According to the Toronto Globe and Mail, hotels in the Loews chain are checking out the Facebook pages of future arrivals to add those little personal touches to their rooms that will be memorable enough… Continue reading →