Fight for Bed Supremacy Spreads to the Skies

I’ve deployed ridiculously martial language there only to underscore a point about hotel bedding, which had been a mundane and boring business among old-line mattress makers until 1999, when Westin Hotels introduced a new mattress and bedding accessories branded as the Heavenly Bed, which was developed by Simmons, the big mattress manufacturer.

Whereupon a couple of remarkable things happened that truly did constitute a big pillow fight, or even a marketing war. First, seeing the overnight (sorry) success of the Heavenly Bed, other hotel companies rushed to develop their own branded high-end bedding, whether made by Simmons or by competitors like Serta or Sealy, which markets hotel-branded bedding through its Global Hospitality Collection, and others.

As hotel companies began buying luxury beds for their properties and selling them through their own catalogs and online sites, the overall retail bedding industry underwent a revolution. Travelers, and especially a new wave of female business travelers after 1999, came home and decided that their own beds simply didn’t measure up to the ones they were finding in hotels.

After the Heavenly Bed introduction, hotels in every top category “understood that they couldn’t have a bed in the room that was crummier than the one the customer had at home,” said Steve Tipton, the vice president of Simmons Hospitality, the mattress company’s hotel unit. At the same time, hotel-branded mattresses started to be sold in retail outlets like department stores, and high-end mattresses and other bedding in general had become such a market standard that overall sales soared, to about $6.8 billion last year.

“The consumer connection between the bed and the hotel is a big deal” in the overall mattress business, Mr. Tipton said.

By 2006, when one hotel company, Hilton, had already invested $1 billion in new bedding since 1999, the hotel mattress race subsided. But now it’s back on. As hotels recover from the recession and begin investing again in improvements, Simmons recently introduced a line of hotel bedding called Recharge Beautyrest, positioned to sell upgraded bedding featuring foams that regulate mattress temperature. And even some airlines are now heralding the virtues of high-end mattresses and bedding in international first-class and business-class cabins, where lie-flat beds have become the industry standard.

For example, Delta Air Lines recently began promoting a new “Westin Heavenly In-Flight bedding product” for its BusinessElite cabins on international flights and on domestic flights between Kennedy Airport in New York and Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, as well as between Atlanta and Honolulu. Singapore Airlines advertises private suites featuring luxurious double beds in first-class cabins of its A380s, and Lufthansa Technik, the maintenance and upgrade unit of the big German airline, is marketing its own Flexidreamer bed (“for a heavenly sleep”), first developed for luxury private jets and now available for first-class cabins on commercial airplanes.

While such sumptuous comforts are most definitely not available in the airlines’ increasingly cramped and austere coach cabins, the evolution of luxury bedding into premium cabins on commercial planes reflects what the hotel business learned well over the last 23 years. As Delta’s announcement of the new high-end bedding for its BusinessElite cabins put it, “In recent surveys, customers have told us that the most important part of the in-flight experience is sleep.”

In the hotel business, a good night’s sleep on high-quality bedding is increasingly a top marketing point. For example, Crowne Plaza hotels, a brand of the IHG hotel group, is emphasizing bedding improvements as part of its multiyear initiative to refurbish quality standards at its hotels in nearly 60 countries.

Incidentally, one of the most interesting aspects of the whole hotel bed-wars phenomenon to me has been the impact on the home-bedding market. For most people, buying a home mattress was always an unpleasant chore, “right up there with used cars,” said Mr. Tipton at Simmons.

But hotels in effect became real-time showrooms for mattresses. No more plopping down uneasily on a mattress at a department store in a futile attempt to try it out. At a hotel, you use the mattress the way you’d use one at home. Then you can purchase that bedding from the hotel company, or from a retail store that sells lines of mattresses branded with whichever hotel they are found in.

“It really takes a lot of the unpleasantness out of trying a mattress out,” Mr. Tipton said.

E-mail: jsharkey@nytimes.com

Fight for Bed Supremacy Spreads to the Skies