How we will work…without a desk?!?

Are you ready to give up your laptop? You need to be - because Marriott hotels are no longer catering for the laptop user…

One of the things I’ve just come to expect in a hotel room is a desk. It’s sort of the default position, and especially when I’m travelling for work, I really need it for writing and photo editing in the evening.

For example, this was my hotel room for NEXT15 in Hamburg earlier in the year:

Hamburg hotel room

Not a huge desk, certainly, but big enough for a laptop, and easy to shift around the room. Good enough.

But even that luxury might be gone soon, as a cultural shift is in progress. Sports writer Dan Setzel turned up to a Marriot hotel – and found it desk-free in its renovated rooms:

There was that little table, but there was no corresponding chair. I tried to jam it between the couch and the far bed but the table is the wrong height for the couch and you had to straddle the table while sitting. It’s not like I was mining for coal here, but what we had was a room purportedly for people who travel for work with no place to actually work.

What inspired this lunacy? Why would they exclude the desk in a business hotel catering to the laptop warrior?

I was told this had to do with the habits of Millennials, who don’t use desks. [Insert “Millennials don’t do any work” jokes here.] They prefer rooms that are designed to “hang out” in and whatever work they do can be accomplished on their phone. Hence we have two beds and a couch but no chair or desk.

Suddenly that iPad Pro is looking like less of a joke as a principal computer, isn’t it?

As for working in the room, I was encouraged to sit on the bed and put my computer on my lap. Maybe some people like this. I don’t. Doesn’t matter. Essentially, Marriott was telling me that my preferred manner of working was wrong.

There might be only one solution for those of us who still reply on our laptops: head for the hotel bar. That has tables and seats.

Hotel foyer

Oh, and alcohol. Don’t forget the alcohol.

[via Boing Boing]