Hotel chains slug it out in battle of the bed

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LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- Most folks prefer to sleep on them, but two big hotel chains are staying up late at night obsessing about them: It is the battle of the beds.

Marriott International and Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. are waging war over who has the better, bigger, softer, nicer, more expensive, best-tested beds, with really great sheets, quilted blankets, down comforters and lots of pillows -- big ones, little ones, silly ones, serious ones.

It all began last year when Starwood was the first, as company officials happily point out, to uncover the new bed concept. Its "Heavenly Bed" launch was accompanied by the kind of showmanship usually reserved for the dawning of a new era.

"After months of testing hundreds of mattresses, pillows and linens, the heavenly bed was born," Starwood gushed, adding that it spent $30 million to develop its new bed.

Starwood, which operates the Sheraton and Westin chains, staged a national rollout that included lining up beds outside the New York Stock Exchange; floating some down a river aboard a barge in Savannah, Georgia, so skydivers could land on them; and putting one aboard the aerial tramway in Palm Springs, California. It says it has spent about $2 million in promotion for the beds.

Not to be outdone, Marriott trundled out its new "Marriott Bed" in early October, dishing out another round of hype despite the product's less-than-inspired, yawn-producing name.

"Marriott spent more than a year designing and testing the bed for Marriott hotels, resorts and suites and Marriott conference centers," the hotel operator crowed in announcing its entry into the arena of new and improved beds. A major publicity campaign is in the works.

All the posturing may seem excessive for a piece of furniture that most people now take for granted, but the bed was originally conceived as a luxury item for the upper classes in early civilizations.

Members of the privileged classes often slept on gemstone-encrusted beds in ancient Egypt, Assyria and Babylon, while commoners slept on the ground with only wooden "pillows" for comfort, according to the Encyclopedia Americana.

The Romans took the bed to new heights in its adapted form as a couch. For most people, it is hard to conjure up images of ancient Rome without imagining a supine senator munching on a bunch of grapes while reclining on a pillow-covered spread.

Beds in Europe remained largely limited to the aristocracy through the Middle Ages and became a place of honor in the 16th century. Louis XIV, for example, considered the bed so important he reportedly owned 413 of them.

Bed use became more widespread in the 17th and 18th centuries, when bedbugs and fleas were common as well. The bed has gone through various forms since then, incorporating such elements as canopies, bed posts, headboards and wheels.

Starwood says it was first to take its beds to a whole new level. It now sell its beds for $1,500 a pop to guests who want them for their homes.

The war of words goes on over which hotel operator has the better bed and who came up with the idea first.

"I have a great amount of respect for Marriott," said Glenn Tuckman, Starwood's senior vice president of North America hotel operations.

"They area an excellent competitor. I don't know if it's imitation or legalized plagiarism. I think they just recognized later than we did the importance of a good night's sleep."

Not so fast, says Marriott. "I would argue we were working on this well before (Starwood)," said Dan Banchiu, Marriott's senior vice president of room operations.

"Involving the customers the way we did is a long-term project. We had approximately 10 hotels involved in developing the bed. It took us more time and it was quite tedious because we wanted to make sure we got enough responses back."

Despite their disagreements on who was first, both sides agree that down pillows and comforters are part of the new equation, and lots of thinner layers to replace the ubiquitous hotel bedspread are also in vogue -- all part of an effort to make the beds less hot and more homey, they say.

So does this leave Hilton Hotels Corp., the nation's other major luxury hotel operator, out in the cold?

Absolutely not, said Hilton spokesman Marc Grossman, who declined to say if Hilton plans to jump on the bed bandwagon. But he conceded that Hilton recently joined, at least in part, by putting comforters on some of its high-end beds.

"A few years ago, before this flurry of bed hype, we did extensive testing and installed in our hotels what we believe is the highest quality beds," Grossman said.

"We continue to do testing to make sure we continue to have high quality beds. We are perfectly comfortable that we've got the highest quality beds in the business and have had for the last few years before this flurry of bed hype."

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Marriott International
Sheraton Hotels and Resorts
Westin Hotels and Resorts
Hilton Hotels

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