A major hotel chain is trying out new alarm clocks designed to wake guests not with beeps or music but with the smells of breakfast.
Wakey wakey, eggs 'n' bakey, indeed.
The "world-first" Breakfast Alarm Clock was devised by Holiday Inn Express by IHG as a way to promote one of the brand's distinguishing perks: complimentary hot breakfast with every stay.
The new alarm clock is essentially a scent diffuser that you can program to emit a fragrance at a specified time.
But instead of adding some drops of essential oils extracted from lavender or eucalyptus, you can choose from the morning-friendly aromas of coffee, bacon, and blueberry muffin.
Holiday Inn Express selected those flavors based on customer surveys, according to a press release.
Starting Monday, October 20, the Breakfast Alarm Clock will be available at Holiday Inn Express hotels throughout Australia and New Zealand, as well as at participating properties in Singapore, Thailand, and Japan.
In Japan you can opt for a pear scent instead of the three fragrances mentioned above, while Singapore and Thailand hotels offer mango.
For now, Holiday Inn Express is only equipping rooms in those places with scent-powered alarms (for dates well into next year in some cases).
But who knows? If the idea catches on, perhaps hotel guests in many more places will get a chance to wake up and smell the synthetic coffee.
Or maybe property owners elsewhere could upgrade their own alarm clocks by incorporating other aspects of the hotel experience.
For sleepers prone to pressing snooze too much, for instance, designers could model the alarm's snooze function after any button on a hotel room's thermostat—press it all you want, but nothing's gonna happen.
Or owners could repurpose all those unused fax machines in hotel business centers by placing the outdated tech bedside to rouse each overnighter with a wake-up fax.
Or, for guests who still prefer a strong audio component, we suggest programming alarms with a symphony of sleep-disrupting hotel noises: loud elevator dings, ice-machine avalanches, muffled arguments through thin walls, and other randomly timed thumps, cries, squawks, and crashes to jolt travelers awake with thoughts such as What on earth was that? and Is that baby okay? and Did somebody check in with a pet macaw?
If there's one thing we know hotels can do, it's come up with new and exciting ways to disturb our sleep.