If it seems like business people are always traveling, they are. Americans took more than 500 million business trips in 2005, according to the Travel Industry Association of America. Business travel is up over the last three years and now accounts for more than a quarter of all U.S. domestic travel. International travel has boomed in recent years as well, and is expected to continue growing through the rest of the decade. Despite technological advances in video conferencing and wireless communication, and a seemingly borderless business world, people still like doing business the old fashioned way. “Technology doesn’t replace the need for face-to-face meetings. There’s still that need for a human connection,” says Joe Pettipas, vice presi­dent and practice leader of retail/hospitality for HOK, Toronto. With more business people traveling, the hospitality industry is responding with better spaces and better support for working on the road. Corporate workplace design strategies have informed some of these hotel changes, while the hospitality industry offers ideas of their own, ideas that workplace planners might consider for other spaces.

Reinventing the lobby.

For example, when JW Marriott, the luxury brand of Marriott International Inc., planned their newest hotel, they put particular emphasis on designing the lobby around the business traveler. “The lobby is the staging area for everything that goes on in a hotel. It’s the best opportunity to address the business traveler’s needs. We wanted the most compelling hotel lobby design in the industry,” says George Aquino, general manager of the JW in Grand Rapids, MI. The worldwide hotel company worked with IDEO, the Palo Alto, CA firm that specializes in industrial and experience design, to create an “experience blueprint,” a kind of roadmap for understanding guest behaviors and needs.