Sun, sand and surfing the Net

Looking over the pool area at the new $250-million Bacara resort in Santa Barbara, California, Shad Lofgreen sees not red-tile roofs, white stucco walls or luscious landscaping, but instead a kind of quietly purring high-tech machine.
The natural beauty of a white sand beach and the sweeping blue Pacific Ocean panorama are just a few steps away, but this place is all Star Trek underneath. “You come here to get away,” says Lofgreen, Bacara’s full-time technology officer. “But what if you get a call and you are on your third day of a seven-day spa package? Someone needs something right away. How are you going to get it there? “We have designed our technology infrastructure to accommodate that. And everything else you might want.”

Welcome to your vacation, new millennium style. New resorts are wired to the hilt these days and older resorts undergoing renovations are all jumping on the bandwagon — not only providing high-speed Internet access in the rooms, but using technology in other ways to increase the quality of service, entertainment and conferences. Nowhere is this trend displayed better than at Bacara, which has been designed and marketed, in part, to attract both entertainment industry types from Los Angeles, which is about two hours south, and dot-com CEO types from Silicon Valley, about four hours north.

The thinking behind it is, essentially, if someone is wealthy enough to stay here, you better provide the kind of technological marvels to which he’s become accustomed. This explains the presence of an $18,000, 42-inch, Fujitsu flat plasma screen television in the Presidential Suite. The suite also offers a built-in custom stereo system, marble floors and a panoramic ocean view. All for just $5,000 a night. Bacara also employs a full-time “technology concierge,” whose main responsibility is to help guests with any and all tech needs.

Most of the time, this involves helping them figure out their dial-up number or providing the right plug-in cord, which they may have forgotten in their haste to get out of their cubicle at work. Bacara’s temporary tech concierge, Jude Augustine, said they will shy away from assisting guests with hardware issues, but everything else is fair game. “So far we have been able to resolve every situation we’ve faced,” he said.

The resort, which charges a rack rate of $450 minimum per night, is filled with technological wonders. Each room was fitted with three phone lines. Each room also has an atomic clock and a DVD player for guests to view movies checked out from the main desk. At the pool area, each of the 26 private pool cabanas has a high-speed Internet jack. Food and drink servers use wireless technology — Mitsubishi XPN tablets — which cut the waiting time by more than half. Bacara has flat-screen monitors at the front desk. It has tiny speakers hidden in the ballroom chandeliers. And with ubiquitous wireless service throughout the resort, guests with wireless devices can keep in touch without plugging in.

About mid-way through their two-year construction process, Bacara hired Loftgreen. It also enlisted RockIt Group, a Los Angeles “hospitality technology” firm, to help out. “More and more hotels and resorts are requiring technology to stay competitive,” said Jeremy Rock, who has worked in the technology field for 12 years. Rock formed the RockIt Group just a year ago in direct response to the new demand for technology in resorts and upscale hotels. “The result is they require an infrastructure that will support all of this technology, and they don’t have the personnel to actually support that on board.”

A year ago, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company hired a “technology butler” for each of its 38 upscale hotels and resorts worldwide. “That is a person who is on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, who can go to guest room and assisting them with any tech difficulties or tech needs,” said spokeswoman Shelby Taylor.

Ritz-Carlton now has high speed internet lines in all of its properties in the United States, as well as dual phone lines and data ports, all necessities in any hotel that wants to stay competitive in the new market, Taylor said. “We are absolutely stepping up our resorts, just like we are in business hotels, to keep p up with the wired traveler we are seeing today,” Taylor said. “In the resorts, people are on vacation, but they still want to keep in touch for either business reasons or personal reasons, either with their own laptops or in our business centers.”

At Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide Inc., which owns more than 800 properties worldwide, technology plans go much further than tech butlers and high-speed Internet service. The company controls more than 220,000 individual rooms under such well known brand names as Westin, Sheraton, and St. Regis. It plans to fit these televisions with its own Starwood information portal, providing access to worldwide reservations, special travel offers, and direct cross sales of products.

“In hotel rooms, you have a captive audience,” says Starwood’s Chief Creative Officer, Scott Williams, a former television industry executive. “Their leisure time and their behaviour is very similar to their home life. But on average, people watch an hour more of television when they are on the road. “If we can captivate them with our content for any portion of that extra hour, then we have a fighting chance of making this profitable and helping them stay loyal to Starwood.”

Perhaps the jewel of Bacara’s technology offerings is its 220-seat, theater-style screening room, with a 9 by 16-foot screen — one of only three hotel screening rooms in the nation. Conceivably, Hollywood directors could view dailies from remote points anywhere in the world, and edit them from portable wireless laptops while sitting in the theater.

The screening room’s electronics were designed and implemented by Sunset Studios, a West Hollywood firm that typically sets up professional recording studios. The screening room — set up for digital, analog and remote transmission capability — has Tannoy recording studio reference speakers and a professional-quality Mackie virtual 72-channel board. “We have designed the system to interface with advanced broadcast video transmission utilizing fiber optics networks, so that the material can physically be a great distance away and watched at broadcast quality on a big screen,” said Jon Edwards, president of Sunset.

Edwards plans to show the Super Bowl in the theater. There is also a 72-seat tiered theater, with a high-speed Internet plug-in at each seat, in a different conference center. That room is controlled through a wireless Crestron touch-screen controller, which can handle everything from lighting to remote video conferencing, and even webcasting. “It’s very Star Trek,” said Regina Auberuschon, a Prudential Securities conference planner from New York who was visiting the facilities.

On screen was a digital version of the Japanese animated movie that inspired The Matrix. “I do a lot of meetings and I’ve been all over the country and I’ve never seen anything like this.” When Bacara hired Lofgreen, it gave him a $4 million budget just for extraneous electronics such as the pool-girl tablets. He works in a refrigerated lab, where he tries to keep tabs on more than 140 computers and 35 point-of-sale stations onsite; a camera and sensor security system; and the Dish Network digital television system that channels 78 satellite-fed channels into each guest room. This may be a resort, but — like the fictional playground created in the ’70s classic Westworld — every wall hides circuitry. “In a regular business, you may have three to four applications running at one time. When you get into a hotel, there are about 30 systems you are using, sometimes more, and so those all have to be integrated, and you have to have knowledge of them all,” Rock said.

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