With test rooms, inn at LAX asks guests to snore and tell

There’s something different about Room 267 at the Hilton Garden Inn, a modest hotel near Los Angeles International Airport that caters mainly to business travelers.

Lights turn on automatically when you enter the room. A 42-inch, flat-screen TV looms over the desk, where there’s a videophone that lets you see who’s outside your door. A leather massage lounge purrs nearby. The generous bathroom has a separate shower and a TV-equipped Jacuzzi, plus European-style fixtures like a towel warmer and a bidet. Settle into the king-size bed and you sink in -- way in.

Hilton Hotels Corp. dubs this the “Room of the Future.” It’s the most technologically advanced of 14 rooms at the inn where the Beverly Hills-based conglomerate tests new features for its many hotel-chain brands, including Embassy Suites, Doubletree and Hampton Inn. Each room has different door hooks, soap dishes, shower heads and other fixtures. One is a resort-style suite complete with garden patio. The rest of the 162-room hotel operates as a regular Hilton Garden Inn.

Guests are the guinea pigs here. Members of Hilton HHonors, the company’s rewards club for frequent travelers, are randomly assigned to the 14 rooms as upgrades, says Barbara Bejan, the hotel’s friendly, efficient general manager. Most mornings between 6:30 and 7:30 you can find her polling the breakfast crowd in the dining area, asking guests what they thought of the rooms. Their answers help determine how Hilton designs new hotels.

“We’re always trying to figure out what’s the next thing,” says Dennis Koci, Hilton’s senior vice president of operations support.

So am I. Which is why I recently toured the test rooms.

Chains typically introduce features in one or two hotels at a time, but Hilton is unusual in using a single place as a laboratory for the whole company, Koci says. The 14-room wing of the Hilton Garden Inn LAX/El Segundo has served that purpose since the hotel opened in 2000. The test rooms are continually undergoing change and have been redesigned about three times in two years.

The company hit on the idea after a costly misadventure a few years ago, when it equipped the 2,000-plus-room Hilton New York with pioneering “smart cards.” The cards have computer chips that combine the functions of a room key and, potentially, credit cards and phone cards. But the combination technology never caught on, and the cards were expensive to replace when lost, costing the hotel tens of thousands of dollars. Small-scale experiments suddenly looked good.

The “Room of the Future” tries to satisfy some contradictory goals. Travelers want their home away from home to be cozy but equipped with the latest TV and Internet gizmos; welcoming to visitors but safe from strangers; luxurious but not costly. It’s a big order for a 390-square-foot space.

For security, there are the motion-sensor lights, the videophone, a safe with digital keypad and an electronic “Do not disturb” sign activated from inside the room. Besides high-speed Internet service, cordless phone and the big-screen TV, there’s a remote control that taps into a digital entertainment world with hundreds of TV shows, movies and music CDs. For luxury, there’s the shower with several shower heads and the bidet-toilet with seat warmer.

And then there’s the bed. It’s positioned at a 45-degree angle to the wall for what Hilton hopes will induce a “warmer, more open feeling.”

Using air baffles supported by wood slats instead of springs, it molds to your body shape and weight, purportedly to eliminate tossing and turning. Each half of the bed, which is also used in some hospitals, can be adjusted separately, lowering or raising the foot or head at different angles for two sleepers.

General Manager Bejan slept on it for three months. Every morning, “I woke up exactly where I had been,” she reports. “It was like I was mummified.” She loved it, but it’s not for everyone, especially at $2,500 to $3,000 per bed.

“The first night, we don’t get a positive reaction,” says Koci, the operations executive. But some guests later grow to like it.

In fact, what keeps hotel rooms from being more cutting-edge is that they can’t depart too much from what we’re used to, he says. We have only a brief time to adapt.

To that end, Koci and his crew have puzzled over how to make the remote unit more user-friendly. “Otherwise,” he worries, “you’re handing manuals to guests.”

Some customers complain to Bejan that the “Room of the Future” lacks a microwave, a standard fixture of Hilton Garden Inns. “Two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of features, and they want a microwave,” Koci says with mock horror.

On the other hand, Bejan says, guests rave about a low-tech accouterment in some test rooms: a double hook on the bathroom door, so that they can hang more stuff. “Long Beach is changing all of theirs,” she says.

Whether we’re ready or not, Hilton is looking seriously at even more room technology. Goodbye, bland pictures on the wall; hello, video screens that you can program to show your favorite art, be it Rembrandt or Picasso. How about a climate control system that emits the soothing sounds and smells of rainfall while projecting TV images of a jungle?

Here’s my favorite: a self-cleaning bathroom. The housekeeper closes the door and pushes a button, and jets in the ceiling, floor and walls spray steam and sanitizing chemicals throughout the room.

I don’t know if this would speed me to a Hilton on my next trip. But I’d order one for my home in a New York minute.

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Jane Engle welcomes comments and suggestions but cannot respond individually to letters and calls. Write Travel Insider, Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012, or e-mail jane.engle@latimes.com.