Hotel Beds Really Can Be the Stuff of Dreams

If you’re hoping for a luxurious bed in a budget hotel, dream on. But even midpriced places can have bad beds, and you probably won’t sleep any better in a pricey hotel’s $1,500-a-night room than in its $450 standard room.

These are tips I’ve garnered from hoteliers, pollsters and folks who make mattresses and box springs. While trying to find out who’s good in bed, hotelwise, I’ve learned about 700-thread-count sheets, pillow menus and more.

Not surprisingly, the pricier the hotel, the better the bed, in general. At least guests think so. Asked to rate their bed’s comfort on a 1-to-10 scale, with 10 highest, guests in luxury hotels gave an average of 8.5 compared with 6.7 in economy or budget hotels, J.D. Power and Associates reported last month. Market Metrix, a market research company in San Rafael, Calif., asked 30,000 customers to rate hotel beds on a 100-point scale. Luxury hotels averaged 89, economy hotels 78 and midpriced hotels in between.

But beds are not all about dollars and cents. Of 87 chains in the Market Metrix survey, the luxury W Hotels and Ritz-Carlton ranked first and second, scoring 98 and 91, respectively. Westin, in the second-tier “upscale” category, was a close third at 90, outperforming its class. Among the five lowest-rated chains for beds were midpriced Ramada and Howard Johnson.

“Bedding hasn’t been a source of complaints for us,” says Emanuel Naim, a spokesman for Cendant Corp.’s hotel group, which runs the Ramada and Howard Johnson brands. He declined to comment specifically on the survey because he hadn’t seen it.

As for the W chain, “I’ve never slept in a more comfortable bed

Another respondent said that Westin’s “ ‘Heavenly Beds’--luxurious mattress, down comforter, down pillows--are the reason we stay at Westin.”

W and Westin use different models of custom-made Simmons mattresses and box springs that you can buy by contacting the hotels. Interestingly, top-rated W’s queen set, priced at $700 for sale to customers, costs less than either Westin’s ($1,100) or Ritz-Carlton’s ($1,149, custom-made by Sealy). But W really puts out for the duvet/comforter, at $280 for a queen, more than Ritz-Carlton or Westin.

The ritziest linens of these three belong, appropriately enough, to the Ritz-Carlton: $445 to $660, depending on the pattern, for a 295-to 300-thread-count Egyptian cotton queen set (top and fitted sheets and two pillowcases). W’s queen set costs just $106.

In fact it’s on top of the bed, in duvets and sheets, where marketers of luxury lodgings really stage their pillow fights.

Westin’s Heavenly Bed, introduced three years ago, is a multilayered wedding cake of pillow-top mattress set, down blanket, three sheets, comforter, duvet and five pillows--all in white. This bed pioneered several trends in upscale chains: duvets, plenty of pillows and an obsession with cleanliness. Midpriced chains are starting to copy it. Next year Sheraton plans to introduce “Sweet Sleeper” beds, patterned after Westin’s and W’s, starting at the Sheraton Studio City in Orlando, Fla.

Cleanliness is the No. 1 concern of room guests in a J.D. Power survey and a Hilton poll of its customers last year.

Hoteliers can launder the duvet cover every day, as some claim to do, or at least after every checkout. By contrast, bulky, dark-colored bedspreads that some budget hotels use show dirt less and are more difficult to launder, so they get cleaned less often, insiders say. (At Motel 6, Red Roof and Studio 6 lodgings, bedspreads must be clean, without stains, hairs or holes, but there is no specific schedule for cleaning them, says David O’Shaughnessy, group executive vice president in Dallas for Accor North America, the budget chains’ owner. He wrote the standards for the hotels. Sheets must be laundered daily, he adds.)

Customers who are “more prone to having luxurious linens in their homes” demand the multiple duvets, comforters and pillows, says Ritz-Carlton spokeswoman Shelby Taylor. Women, who tend to spend more time in their guest rooms, particularly want luxury, says Leo Vogel, national sales manager, contract division, for Sealy.

Competition focuses on the top of the bed because, except for the extremes of low-end and high-end lodgings, what’s underneath may not be radically different among hotels, some experts say.

Most hotels order beds with sturdier springs and ticking than the average bed at home just for their durability, Vogel says. O’Shaughnessy, who oversees about 150,000 beds in 1,200 hotels, says Accor requires each bed submitted for bids to be tested with a 240-pound weight rolled over it 10,000 times, simulating five to seven years of wear. Within the same hotel, different-priced rooms usually get the same mattresses and box springs, but top-level presidential or bridal suites that cost thousands of dollars a night may get higher grades, Vogel says.

Many big chains custom-order beds to their specifications, so the exact model may not be available in retail stores, although some hotels sell them.

For the well-heeled, there are some cutting-edge choices. Among them:

* Villa Toscana: This new eight-room inn at a Paso Robles, Calif., vineyard estate, which charges $320 to $1,600 per night, uses 700-thread-count, custom-made Italian sheets. Patricia Koberl, the inn’s director of hospitality operations, recalls that one customer didn’t believe it “when I said we have 700-count sheets.”

“She thought I said, ‘We have 700 sheep,’ ” Koberl says, adding that the sheets are “very soft” but high maintenance, requiring hand pressing after their daily laundering. “We’re bed connoisseurs,” she says of herself and the inn owners.

* Post Ranch Inn: At this plush Big Sur resort, guests are swaddled in organically grown cotton and sleep on wool or cotton mattresses made by Restonic or Royal-Pedic. You can buy queen sets for $1,350 to $3,075, depending on model, and sheets ($105 to $120 for queen; other sizes available) from Post Ranch Mercantile, (831) 667-2795, www.postranchmercantile.com.

* The Benjamin in New York and the Ritz-Carlton in Philadelphia: These are among hotels offering a variety of by-request pillows (stuffed with items as diverse as wheat chaff and magnets) or even full-body cushions.

Meanwhile, hotels continue to search for the perfect bed. Hilton Hawaiian Village in Honolulu is testing a version that uses air baffles and wooden slats instead of springs, says Dennis Koci, senior vice president of operations support for Beverly Hills-based Hilton. Adjusting to body contours and weight, the bed is said to be good for your back and varicose veins.

“This is an idea way ahead of its time,” Koci says.

And something to sleep on.

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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.