Marriott gave Fortune an early look at its “VRoom Service” program which lets guests at New York and London hotels order a Samsung Gear VR and keep it for 24 hours. The headset arrives “hand-delivered” with headphones “in a steel briefcase.” It comes pre-loaded with a couple panoramic videos made by Framestore for Marriott showing how traveling has changed lives. More important, the headset comes with “access to the rest of the Samsung Milk VR platform.”
This sounds like a cool idea, as did handing Gear VR to people flying Qantas for in-flight entertainment. However, watching something in-flight is a bit different from being in the relative privacy of a hotel room. On a flight other people can see what you’re doing in reality and in a hotel room you are unseen. To be blunt, you don’t have to search Google for long to find directions for how to add immersive porn to the MilkVR app.
Have you ever felt icky wondering what people did in your hotel room sheets prior to you snuggling up for the night? Will Marriott clean these face-hugging headsets with the same regularity as those sheets? And what about the unfortunate cleaning staff who happen upon a person who had a long night of drinking in a VR porn paradise and didn’t hear the knock at the door? Housekeeping can’t unsee whatever position they find the guest in.
The new VR-to-your-room experiment by Marriott follows a marketing effort last year to promote travel with a virtual honeymoon.
“This is as much about behavioral feedback as how excited people are about it,” Marriott’s VP of Global Brand Marketing Michael Dail told Fortune. “And for some people if it’s just a cool one-time VR experience, that’s fine too.”
The “VRoom Service” is available for two weeks at the New York Marriott Marquis and the London Marriott Park Lane.
