Add the TV zapper to the list of hotel room amenities one step closer to the junk heap.

Last week LodgeNet, the largest provider of in-room entertainment, introduced a new app that lets hotel guests use their smartphones to operate the TV. The free LodgeNet Mobile App turns an iPhone, iPad or Android into a hotel room remote control that does it all –  turns the TV on and off, adjusts the sound and accesses free TV, on-demand TV and pay-per-view movies.  The app also serves up information about the hotel and local events, restaurants, maps and attractions. (more…)

Mr. Big with starfruit

Cocktails as health drinks? In your dreams. Still, every day, it seems, another hotel bar announces an ingredients purge – out with processed juices, prefab mixes and high fructose corn syrups and in with fresh squeezed juice (complete with traces of pulp), mint leaves and sliced fruit.

Bars at boutique hotels, like the Royalton’s revamped Forty-Four, have led the all-natural, fresh-everything, organic-when-possible charge. (more…)

A new, ultra-clean showroom at the Hyatt.

Once upon a time, no hotel room was complete without an ashtray. Non-smoking rooms eventually appeared and, voila, room categories were born.

Now the choices for guests booking at a small but growing number of hotels include a third category   – the hypo-allergenic room, cleansed within an inch of its life of nearly all surface and air-born impurities. For the estimated one in five people afflicted with allergies or asthma, this is news worth noting. (more…)

We find it really hard to get excited about a new banking product, even when there’s a hotel connection. But we can see the appeal of a new credit card that made its debut yesterday.

Use the Hyatt Chase Visa card just once, and you get two free nights at any Hyatt property in the world, including New York outposts like the shiny new Andaz hotels on Wall Street and Fifth Avenue. (more…)