Hotels to Smell Like Pie

I once stayed in a rather grungy hotel in a small town in Colorado that had an awful smell. I’m still not sure what the odor was, some mixture of rotten eggs and Lysol. A sour-sewage reek whose malodorous molecules still haunt my olfactory cortex to this day. Obviously, I will never go back to this hotel.

But what if you went to a hotel where everything smelled very pleasant? The delicious fragrance of hot apple pie wafting through the halls, the sweet whiff of begonias in your room. (Question: in Vegas, will they have pheromone-scented hallways).

Well, the folks over at adjab have posted about a new campaign by Sheraton Hotels for their Four Points chain that will intentionally introduce satisfying odors into the lobby and other points in the hotel. For example, White Tea scent will be sniffed in the Westin chain (which might mean nothing to those of us who have no idea what white tea smells like). No matter. This is all very clever, and those who orchestrated this campaign are obviously aware that they are dealing in primitive grey matter, that it is our olfactory cortex that is the oldest and in some ways most powerful sense. Freud would be proud.