Posted by Marshall Krantz under HospitalityResponses (3)

Bill Marriott, chairman and CEO of Marriott International, touted his company's hotel lobby of the future during a luncheon Sunday with travel journalists at the San Francisco Marriott.

Called the "great room," the new lobby for full-service, mainly business hotels is intended as a gathering place, with food service from snacks to full meals so that people will linger. Different areas within the lobby are designed to encourage people to interact with others at various levels of intensity, say one-on-one or in larger groups.

That's a radical departure from the typical lobby at U.S. business hotels. The typical lobby seems designed especially for those who want to make a beeline from the front door to the front desk, or vice versa.

The hotel lobby as social space represents a return to a time when the lobby often served as the center of a community's social and business life -- a time that never left hotels in other parts of the world, such as Asia and the Middle East.

Paradoxically, as Marriott pointed out, the kind of communications technology -- web conferencing, for example -- that allows people not to travel is in large part driving the initiative for a new/old kind of lobby.

As business people winnow out the non-essential trips, the trips they do take increasingly focus on matters that only face-to-face meetings can most successfully accomplish.

That's where the new lobby comes in, as a place for those meetings to take place.

"Hotels will become more of a factor in the traveler's life," Marriott predicted.

The new lobbies, to be installed as properties renovate, will help groups add value to their own meetings. When attendees break from the formal program, they can easily continue networking in the lobby of the future.