Boomers opting for comfort over vibe of trendy hotels

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In recent years, hotel chains have created their own “lifestyle” brands that convey the message: You are where you stay. Among the lines: InterContinental’s Indigo, which offers this guest room in Shanghai.

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Updated: September 3, 2011 12:33AM

Despite losing some hair and gaining some weight on the road to becoming 57, Doug Leeds considers himself a with-it enough guy. He owns an iPad, uses Bluetooth and drives a BMW.

“I never thought of myself as square,” says the Columbus, Ohio, developer.

That is, until he walked into the Andaz West Hollywood hotel last year, where instead of a clerk behind a check-in desk, he was approached by a “host” teched-out like an extra in “TRON 2.”

“It was awkward standing in an open space exchanging information,” Leeds says. “I felt as old and stale as vending machine pretzels at a bus station.”

He’s not the only one. Some of the hallmarks of cutting-edge urban hotel design — lobbies that double as party lounges, low-slung seating that (for those of a certain age) make getting up gracefully a challenge and complicated in-room control panels that bewilder — are signs that your hotel might be too hip for you.

The so-hip-it-hurts aesthetic isn’t new. Ian Schrager is widely credited with pioneering the edgy urban boutique concept when he opened New York’s Morgans hotel in 1984. In 2005, he sold his shares in what by then had become a successful multiple-property enterprise. Now, Schrager has launched a company whose first lodging is scheduled to open this September in Chicago’s iconic Ambassador East hotel.

Schrager, 64, also has partnered with Marriott in creating that chain’s new “luxury lifestyle” brand, Edition. (The first made its debut last year in Hawaii. A second opened earlier this year in Istanbul.) He characterizes the concept as “a generation of hotels for my generation. They’re not willing to sacrifice anything to stay in the coolest place in town.”

Brian McCarty doesn’t necessarily seek out the coolest place in town, but despite his best efforts, he sometimes ends up there, anyway. Case in point: West Hollywood’s The Standard hotel, from the portfolio of uber-hip hotelier Andre Balaz. McCarty, 56, a recording studio owner, calls the rooms “annoying and uncomfortable” with lighting chosen for design, not function.

In fact, dim lighting is among top complaints contributors to the review site TripAdvisor level at trendy hotels. Loud lobby bar scenes and bad service also rank high.

Joan Eisenstodt, a Washington hospitality industry consultant, recalls fumbling for a flashlight as she made her way to her room in the W hotel in San Diego.

“W’s are fabulous. But they’re clearly not designed for anyone over the age of 35,” says Eisenstodt, 63. “The halls are too dark. They’re not even safe!”

Low lighting can conceal a multitude of design flaws, but it also has the effect of causing people to talk more softly, notes Tina Edmundson, a former W executive who is now overseeing the “reinvention” of Marriott’s 148 Renaissance hotels. The reincarnated chain will have social lobbies with curated live music programs and staff “navigators” who are hip to the local scene. But Renaissance also will strive for “broad appeal.”

“We don’t want to be too cool for school,” says Edmundson, 43. “But I don’t want to be in a hotel that my dad would stay in. I want to stay in a hotel where I feel I belong, where they’re not forcing their programming on me, but it’s there if I want it.”

That can be a tricky equation, given that age is just one factor in an individual’s psychographic makeup.

“There are people who skew older but are young at heart and want to hang out in a more youthful environment,” says Chip Conley, 50, executive chairman of Joie de Vivre Hotels. “If the type is too small on the menu, they’ll just put on their glasses and deal with it.”

The 35 boutique hotels in the Joie de Vivre collection were created by using magazines (Real Simple meets Dwell, for instance) as inspiration. The idea is to appeal to guests’ lifestyles.

Boutique hoteliers like Conley may have pioneered this approach, but in recent years the chains have followed with their own “lifestyle” brands that convey a message: You are where you stay. (Among the lines: Hyatt’s Andaz, InterContinental’s Indigo, Starwood’s W and Aloft, and Marriott’s Edition.)

But can a hotel be too hip? Yes, says Conley, if it isn’t mindful of its target audience.

Hotel consultant Daniel Edward Craig says some hoteliers have gotten so immersed in cutting-edge design, they’ve neglected service.

“If the service and staff are warm, they can overcome the initial intimidation you feel when you walk into a foreign environment,” he says. “The problem is that some hotels have put so much money into design and hired the wrong staff.”

Craig, the former general manager of Vancouver’s trendy Opus hotel, believes a hotel “can make you feel a bit cooler for being there, or it can make you feel not cool enough.”

Adam Goldberg, 43, encountered a similar scenario upon arriving at New York’s Hudson. “It was like checking into a nightclub,” says the Fairfax, Va., digital-TV consultant.

Allowing the bar scene to overwhelm the front desk can be off-putting. “Where they get it wrong is they become a hotel wrapped around a bar,” Craig says.

Even Steve Carvell, associate dean of the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, admits to occasionally being confounded by the technical complexities in some lifestyle hotels. But just as you might trade in your sports car for a van when you have kids, you might need to seek a different hotel as you age.

“The brand doesn’t have to shift. It’s a question of whether you [now] belong in that demographic,” says Carvell, 54.

Eisenstodt has a different take.

“I think hotel designers are going a little crazy in trying to be hip. There are boomers who may want to stay in a cool hotel. But they want light they can read by and furniture they don’t have to struggle to get up from,” she says. “When you’re 60-something and not totally cool and you’re not made to feel welcome, you wonder, ‘Isn’t the hospitality industry supposed to make you feel welcome?’”

Gannett News Service