Monday, May. 16, 1983

Bed and Keyboard

No respectable hotel room is complete without a color television and telephone. If Travelhost Network, a travel-service company based in Dallas, has its way, soon no hotel room will be complete without a computer. When Travelhost's compact Quazon computer terminals are hooked up to a television and telephone, guests can check airline schedules and make reservations, scan U.P.I, reports for the latest news and stock prices, catch the sports scores or play electronic games. Business travelers can read messages or documents transmitted from their offices.

Chicago's Midland Hotel has already put terminals in 100 of its 300 rooms at a cost of $30,000. Some 120 other hotels, including Hiltons, Sheratons, Marriotts and Holiday Inns, are currently installing the machines in 80 cities.

The computer service costs $3 for the first 20 minutes during the nighttime and 17-c- a minute after that. The terminal, though, has a mean streak. When it beats a guest badly at electronic backgammon, it flashes on the TV screen, "You are obviously a rank amateur. Better luck next time."

Fly the Sybaritic Skies

While many airlines are slashing prices and skimping on service, Regent Air, a new carrier based in Los Angeles, intends to chart a different course. When its twice-daily flights between Los Angeles and New York City begin in July, passengers will live high as they fly high. Amid a lavish art deco decor, they will sip Taittinger champagne from fine crystal and dine on caviar and fresh Maine lobster. They will have plenty of room to stretch and stroll. Regent Air's 727 jets will carry a maximum of 36 travelers, in contrast to up to 130 on other airlines' 727 flights. Four private compartments on board will have queen-size beds. Says Regent Air President F. Michael Rogers: "It's a bit of a nostalgia trip. We want our flights to be as luxurious as train travel was 50 years ago." The price: $1,500 one way, compared with the standard first-class fare of $539 and economy-class rates as low as $199.

Rogers says that the main market for his posh service is bicoastal executives from the entertainment and garment industries who frequently shuttle back and forth between Los Angeles and New York. He believes they will be ready to pay for a flight that is "10% airline and 90% service."

Sweden's Crash of '83

Swedish stockbrokers were as gloomy last week as characters in a bleak Ingmar Bergman movie. The Stockholm stock exchange was still and silent, idled temporarily by a total breakdown in an electronic system for registering trades. Millions of transactions being processed at the time of the crash were suddenly in limbo. Said Broker Sven Hagstroemer: "It's a scandal. You can't get your money, and you can't get your stocks." Nothing so disastrous had happened to the exchange since it shut down during a financial panic in 1932 after Match King Ivar Kreuger went bankrupt.

Until the snafu, Sweden's stock market was booming because of laws passed in 1978 and 1980 that offered tax breaks on investments in corporate shares. The number of Swedes owning stock has since more than tripled, to 1.25 million, or nearly one-sixth of the country's population. The value of transactions on an average day at the Stockholm exchange has risen more than 4,500%, to 357 million kroner ($47.9 million). That surge eventually overwhelmed the British ICL 2966 computers used to register trades.

Three teams of technicians have been working round the clock in eight-hour shifts in an effort to reopen the exchange this week. In the meantime, Swedes are improvising. The business paper Dagens Industri is providing free classified ads for anyone wishing to sell stock directly to another person. One stockholder took out an ad offering to buy 5,000 shares of Volvo for 455 kronor ($61) each, almost the same as the pre-crash price of 45 8 kronor. . This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.