Welcome to the hotel room of the future: an ergonomic, open living area "that guests can tailor to their individual needs."

With a "fiber optically lit carpet swaying to star lights twinkling on the ceiling above the bed," the rooms will feature curtains and glass walls "that can be transformed with adjustable colored lighting" and "a personal beverage station will be filled with the guest's favorite drinks."

This is the vision of Holiday Inn, which has come up with a model room for the needs of the traveler in 2054.

"The key is flexibility, allowing them to control their environment through technology, allowing them to create a true home from home," said Stephen Powell, Holiday Inn's senior vice president for sales and marketing for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

It will be, to paraphrase the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, a machine for living in.

For example, the personal exercise area would include virtual links with fitness instructors to a virtual marathon through a city of your choice. Press your feet down on the workout mat for a calorie count, body weight and blood pressure reading. Mirrors could analyze your "facial image" and give examples of, say, how your hair could look. You could nurture your nostrils from the "atomizer selection" with smells like newly cut grass or baking bread.

And the multifunction table area would provide a practical working surface with keyboard functions and a touch screen that could transform into to a dressing table and mirror.

The hotel room has come a long way since the 1960s, when I started traveling on business. Driving down from Michigan to Indiana, I would look for the Holiday Inn sign as a guarantee of a comfortable bed for the night. Rooms were exactly the same at each property: a bed, a small tub and towels. The only gizmos were a black-and-white TV and a "massage boy" - insert a quarter and the mattress would vibrate for a few minutes. You did your own "virtual" experience.

Since those simpler days, travelers' expectations have kept pace with their requirements. Everybody expects a comfortable bed, good shower, color TV with umpteen channels and Internet access. Business travelers want more recognition, more control; the hotel bedroom has become a command center, not so much a home away from home as an office from home.

For the futuristic room, Holiday Inn recruited a British interior designer, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, to create computer graphics, and Martin Corbett, professor of psychology at Warwick University in Coventry, England, to predict what hotel guests would want in 50 years.

"We've looked at cultural trends. People want a home from home, a sense of comfort and reassurance," Corbett said. "They want to have mastery over the technology they're using, to be in control, the power to create their own experience and their own environment - not just access to the Internet, but the climate of a room, the sound of a room; and involving the senses."
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What happens to the old-fashioned notion of hospitality? "This kind of technology saves us time learning about your needs," Powell said, adding that it would allow hotels to "meet expectations because they will have been anticipated."

Cleanliness and location are the most important factors in rating a hotel stay in three-, four- and five-star hotels, according to a survey of more than 245,050 travelers who have stayed at hotels booked by HotelClub.com over the past 10 months. Price, service and facilities were the next most important in two- and three-star hotels; service, facilities and pricing in four-star; and facilities, service and pricing in five-star properties.

HotelClub.com is a booking site offering savings at more than 10,000 one to five-star properties in 1,400 cities in 48 countries. It is available in English, Japanese, Chinese, French, German, Italian and Spanish.