Following from a posting from Dave Weinberger, I’ve been thinking about hotels. Hotel guests constitute potential temporary communities of interest: groups of people dislocated from their familiar context, but with similar needs. Everyone wants to know where to eat, what’s going on, and everyone has an interest in their temporary residence: the quality of accomodation & service, the overall experience.

Hotels have a real opportunity to add value through the provision of infrastructure to help their guests to network & work as a community, sharing their experiences & building local knowledge.

It seems that the hotel sector is slow even to provide more than slow, expensive dialup networking, and missing completely the opportunity to provide local network services. The quickest, most effective way for innovators to gain a market edge would be the provision of inhouse wireless nodes. This would provide valued guests with very flexible internet access, while exploiting the characteristics of reception to provide a platform for valuable community services, including pseudo peering for guests to share knowledge amongst themselves. In essence, such a platform would build on the ideas of presence being exploited by the emerging generation of location-based people-finding systems being developed for conference events. Guests could locate & network with other like-minded guests, and share knowledge related to both the hotel itself & its locality, without the central resource costs of a centralised ‘online concierge’. Thoughts to explore in depth later.

[later: Dave also points to a news story relating Intel's tie-ups with hotel chains to provide at wifi hotspots. It's unclear from the story if these deals provide any value-added locality services on top of the wifi access layer, but in any case, a step in the right direction.]