A few weeks back, I was fortunate enough to spend a weekend off the grid at my fiancée’s remote summer lake house. While I admit I felt a tinge of separation anxiety as I forced myself to leave my BlackBerry behind, the resulting escape from Internet access proved most refreshing.
                                      
For about 24 hours, that is.

As a Saturday evening conversation with my fiancée’s brothers turned to rival sports teams, a certain blasphemous claim was made that required immediate statistical clarification. Fortunately, a member of our party—the resident technophile—came to the debate armed with his iPhone.

With a few slides of the finger on the phone’s touch screen, he pulled up the numbers in question and laid the argument to rest. (I found myself on the losing side, for those keeping score.)

I don’t share this story to reveal my own inadequacies in the knowledge of sports or to hawk Apple’s snazzy smartphone. Rather, I mean to illustrate how seamlessly intuitive touch-screen technology is becoming. What once existed as a confined arrangement of digital buttons (think check-in kiosks and POS), has evolved into a fluid, stylish presentation that requires virtually no learning curve.

Nowhere is this evolution more apparent or relevant in the lodging industry than in select Sheraton hotels throughout the U.S.

Last week, the hotel group debuted Microsoft’s “Surface” in hotel lobbies in Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Seattle. The table-top, surface computer employs touch screen similar to that of the iPhone, but on a much larger scale—the coffee-table sized machine resides much more comfortably in a hotel lobby than in a user’s pocket. 

I haven’t used a Surface myself, but after seeing the machine in action on the Web, I’d certainly like to. The sleek unit looks like a glass-topped table with a flat-screen TV lying beneath the surface. Besides looking pretty, it also allows users to search through Sheraton locations around the world and create personal music playlists by simply pointing and sliding their fingers.

Those applications appear to be nothing more than bells-and-whistles fluff, but that’s not to say the Surface’s offerings are only screen-deep. The machine also features an incredibly useful CityTips program that allows guests to search and get directions to local restaurants and bars, entertainment, transportation and services. 

I doubt that concierges need to abandon their posts just yet, though. For one, the Surface has appeared in only a few locations in even fewer cities. More importantly, some travelers will always prefer person-to-person communication over the “Oooh-ahh” flash of a touch screen.

But in a market where differentiation is increasingly defined by technology, it’s likely that Sheraton will introduce the unit throughout its portfolio. Whether or not the unit can give a much-needed boost to occupancy, we’ll have to wait to see.

For now, at least, it might just end a few arguments between guests traveling off the grid.