SCIENCE / TECHNOLOGY : Santa Ana Firm Test-Markets Phone Answering Machines for Hotel Rooms

As if telephone answering machines in the office and home weren’t enough, now a Santa Ana firm thinks hotel guests should have them in their rooms as well.

EECO Computer, which makes computerized hotel management systems, has added a new feature to its system that enables hotel guests to use their room telephone as a personal answering machine.

EECO is touting the feature as a way for hotel guests to avoid the aggravations of having to check with the front desk for messages.

“When there is human intervention in a message system, there is a tremendous opportunity for error,” said Gerald N. Soma, EECO’s vice president of marketing. “Messages are lost, or sometimes there is something that is lost in translation.”

Soma said the answering system also guarantees that a guest’s messages remain private. “That’s a serious issue with a lot of business people,” he said. “The information being transmitted might be of a confidential business nature.”

EECO is test-marketing the hotel answering system at hotels in Toronto and Boston.

With the system, each hotel telephone serves as a personal answering machine for the guest. Guests record their outgoing messages, callers leave their messages, and the guests can retrieve the messages when they return to their rooms. Guests can also retrieve their messages from remote locations.

EECO will initially focus its marketing efforts on large, full-service hotels, Soma said. He declined to specify how much the system would cost to install in an average-size hotel.