NEW YORK? The cordless phone is becoming a popular appliance in hotel rooms for properties seeking to present the high-tech conveniences of home to their guests. Wyndham International will begin to install two-line cordless speaker phones in its Wyndham Hotels and Resorts guestrooms as a brand amenity this summer. The Dallas-based hotel company, which owns the majority of its hotels, will select between two providers who are currently developing them, said a spokesman, declining to name the suppliers. The 900-megahertz phones will be specially designed for hotels with ?spread spectrum? to avoid bleed over to other channels. That means phone conversations will not be picked up from one guestroom to another. The cordless phone will also have a dataport that can be used to connect laptops to the Internet. That is in addition to the fact that Wyndham is also, separately, providing wired and wireless in-room Internet access to its hotels as a brand amenity, supplied by Wayport. The cordless phones will be rolled out in August as part of a systemwide room revamp that will also include replacing linens and mattresses. After the roll-out is completed early next year, the phones will be installed in Summerfield Suites properties. Omni Hotels meanwhile will install a new 900-megahertz cordless phone model produced by Teledex in all of its suites, according to Cary Schoppelrei, Omni?s corporate telecommunications manager. ?A lot of customers want it,? said Schoppelrei. The two-line phone, which should be available this summer, will have a ?Secure Check? which secures conversations from leaking over to each other. Schoppelrei said that guests? who are demanding from hotels the amenities that they have at home? will be able to walk around the oversized rooms with ease while using the cordless device. While Westin has not yet implemented cordless phones as a brand strategy, several of its flagged properties have them, including the Westin San Francisco Airport and the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco. The historical Westin St. Francis, in fact, installed its Eriksson Freepoint digital, cordless phones in each guestroom a good two years ago, making it one of the first making it one of the first hotels on the West Coast to do so, said Ron Ryan, service express quality manager for the hotel. The phone, which must be used on property, is utilized widely by guests attending conferences at the hotel, he said. Calls, which go through the hotel operator, can follow a guest anywhere on the property. They are available in every guestroom at the hotel, and can be activated for $7.95, said Ryan, adding that the property is now installing high-speed Internet access in its meeting rooms using T-1 lines provided by Pacific Bell. Internet access in guestrooms will follow, he said. Kimpton?s Hotel Palomar installed cordless phones into its guestrooms when it opened last year, said Jorge Trevinos, the property?s general manager. To match the hip style of the boutique hotel, the Sony 900-megahertz phones are platinum in color and are just one of the three phones in each of the hotel?s high-tech rooms. ?The guests love to get up and walk around the room with them,? said Trevinos, noting that the hotel doesn?t encourage guests to take them to a different floor or to the fitness center. That?s because the property, which was carved out of a 93-year-old building, was well constructed with steel walls, making it hard to get reception out of the vicinity, said Trevinos. While the phones, which are from Sony?s year 2000 product offerings, were not designed specifically for hotels, Trevinos noted their 900 megahertz frequency prevents phone calls from being picked up by the guest in the next room. Both meeting planners and individual travelers find the phones an attractive amenity, he added. Cordless phones have been a brand amenity for Cendant?s Wingate Inn since the high-tech brand was born. That?s because focus groups used before launching the brand said
