I thought the Sheraton was a fine choice of hotel. There were some limitations due to the pandemic and the Marriott and Hilton brands offer slightly nicer decor but at this point I have spent so much time living in hotels that I really don't care very much about the precise quality of the granite surround of the sink.
There was one thing that did strike me as having room for improvement. And here, the answer lies in ourselves.
If you used the in-room TV rather than ignoring it (as I usually do), you will have noted that not only did it provide an easy means of plugging in a HDMI cable (hooray!), it also provided an easy way to connect to my NetFlix, Pandora etc. subscriptions. Another thing I very much appreciated in the Sheraton is that they did not reset my room thermostat to freezing each day which seems to be the norm in US hotels.
Now don't get me wrong, that is really really good, much better than I have seen at any other hotel. And yet...
What if...
What if when I book a hotel room or rent a car, it could be automatically provisioned with all the subscriptions, etc. etc. that I hold?
Also, rather more generally, I do not actually have different preferences for room temperature according to the season (they vary by time of day but not by much). Many hotels seem to think I want the room to be freezing cold in the summer and boiling hot in winter. If I wanted to do that, I would simply move to Australia and not bother with HVAC at all.
So if that information could simply be downloaded into the thermostat, that would do nicely.
One more thing which is a bit more IETF specific (but not a lot) is that the big limitation for using a TV for teleconferencing right now is that (1) TV's don't have cameras and (2) I am absolutely not going to buy any TV that does have a camera unless it is fully visible and comes with a hardware lens cover.
So I want to be able to use my mobile phone camera for video in a WebRTC interaction taking place on a separate device. Not just in meetecho, as a general WebRTC capability.
These all seem to me to be problems that require a mixture of open specifications and some intelligent consideration of security concerns.
