Ear­lier this week, I stayed at the Mar­riott Metairie hotel in New Orleans, because I was in town to give a pre­sen­ta­tion for SOLINET. I’ve been stay­ing in Hamp­ton Inn hotels when­ever pos­si­ble lately, because they have very com­fort­able beds, offer free wifi, and pro­vide free break­fast (all at a great price), so I haven’t been in an upgraded Mar­riott lately. Let me tell you, though, that if more Mar­riotts are upgrad­ing to be like the Metairie, I may just be switch­ing, because this was the most awe­some, techno room I’ve ever stayed in.

At first, I was just thrilled to see the read­ing lights on the head­board and the easily-accessible out­lets near the bed. And of course there was a nicely-largish LCD TV. These touches are much appre­ci­ated, but what actu­ally made me gasp out loud was the A/V panel. Yes, you read that right, the A/V panel.

Appar­ently this is part of a ser­vice called Plug into Mar­riott, and it’s a trav­el­ing geek’s dream come true. In fact, I’d love to have one of these in every room in my house! The panel has four surge-protected out­lets, an eth­er­net port, an audio-in port, RCA jacks, an S-Video port, a com­puter video port, and even a mem­ory card reader. This means you can plug in your lap­top (to do work or watch a DVD), an MP3 player to lis­ten to music, a dig­i­tal cam­era to view pic­tures, or a cam­corder to watch videos. You can even plug in a game con­sole, and in fact they actu­ally encour­age this by includ­ing this infor­ma­tion in the doc­u­men­ta­tion. Equally impor­tant, the hotel pro­vides all of the cables, since most of us don’t carry these things around.

The doc­u­men­ta­tion could use a lit­tle help (it tells you to use the TV/video but­ton to get to the dif­fer­ent options, but the old remote in my room only had a “func­tion” but­ton that I cor­rectly guessed would do the trick), and the split-screen for working/watching never kicked in, but I was able to watch TV shows on Hulu and lis­ten to music from my iPod through the tele­vi­sion set.

This whole con­cept is a great exam­ple of say­ing “yes” and mak­ing things eas­ier for cus­tomers, as opposed to say­ing “no,” which is what most hotels do by dis­abling the ports on the back of the TV in the room. It’s a good les­son for libraries how easy it is to make the user expe­ri­ence better.

There’s a direc­tory of “plugged-in” Mar­riotts on the site, and it looks like there are quite a few of them. I’ll def­i­nitely be look­ing at these as I travel, although real­is­ti­cally, if the rooms cost sub­stan­tially more and I then still have to pay for inter­net access on top of that price, I’m likely to stay with my Hamp­ton Inns. Still, this appeals to the geek in me, and I think it shows how dig­i­tal our media is becom­ing, as well as how expec­ta­tions around using that media con­tinue to march forward.