(FORTUNE Magazine) – The by-the-book research wonks at Marriott knew something strange was going on when business travelers rejected spacious accommodations in king-bed rooms and instead requested the comparatively cramped quarters of rooms outfitted with two double beds. What, Marriott wondered, could lonely business travelers be doing with two beds?

"They let us know that our rooms didn't have a good place to work," says Gordon Lambourne, a Marriott executive assigned to the development team that cracked the mystery, "so they needed that extra bed to spread out their papers and get themselves organized."

Marriott and several other hotel chains have since rushed to create special rooms stocked with all manner of business amenities--Space Age desks, ergonomically correct chairs, fancy lighting, fax machines, computer printers, and copiers --branded with painfully cute names: The Room That Works (Marriott), The Guest Office (Westin), The Business Plan (Hyatt), and even the instinctively prosaic Business Class Room (Loews).

Every business traveler who's ever been nicked for $20 to send a five-page fax by a rapacious hotel business center will appreciate an in-room fax machine. Any laptop-toting executive who's crawled on all fours in search of a power plug or a telephone jack will love the desks that feature built-in power outlets and dataports. And frequent travelers like cable consultant Israel Switzer, who flies with his own supply of 100-watt bulbs because he finds standard hotel lighting inadequate, will be elated by the adjustable task lamps.

But business-oriented guest rooms also raise a confounding list of questions. Do business travelers want their sleeping chambers cluttered with the minutiae of their business day? Can hotels, which have trouble managing freestanding business centers, intelligently transform guest rooms into guest offices? Should business travelers be forced to pay a premium room rate for all the gadgets and gimmicks?

Hotels can't agree on the answer to any of these questions. That's not surprising for an industry that can't agree on where to put the power switch on a table lamp--have you ever been in two rooms where the lamps turn on the same way? While the result of that chaos is, well, chaos, smart travelers can take advantage of the confusion and cut a deal that best suits their needs.

For instance, there's the keep-it-simple school of hotel room/offices--take advantage of it if you just want to catch up on some light paperwork on the road. You'll find that there's a faction of the hotel industry that insists that business travelers want and need nothing more in their rooms than a comfortable place to work. So they're installing better desks, chairs, and lighting but eschewing the in-room fax machines, printers, and other computerized wizardry.

Marriott's Room That Works, for example, features a large console table and a rolling writing desk. A tilting ergonomic chair with an adjustable seat has replaced the rigid, old-style desk chair. A special glare-free desk lamp with a swivel arm sits atop a base outfitted with two power outlets and a dataport. Best of all, the in-room workstation is free.

"Travelers are self-contained when it comes to the technology. They don't want the faxes and printers in their rooms," claims Bob Dirks, senior vice president for marketing at Hilton. After testing an in-room computerized office center, Dirks has committed Hilton to a basics approach that imitates the Marriott arrangement. "Our customer is telling us that he doesn't really need a fax machine in the room because he has faxing capacity in his laptop, and E-mail is replacing faxing anyway."

Yet the flaw in Dirks's argument is obvious: Without in-room technology similar to what's available back at the office, travelers are forced to rely on notoriously unreliable hotel business centers, where prices are high, hours are limited, and it is socially incorrect to wander around in your boxer shorts while knocking out a few last-minute photocopies.

So, led by Westin, Hyatt, and Sheraton, another faction of hoteliers have built mini-business centers in each guest room. Westin's Guest Office boasts a Marriott-style workstation as well as a combination laser printer, fax machine, and copier; Wintel- and Macintosh-compatible printer cables; a surge protector; a speakerphone; and a rasher of office supplies.

In-room technology doesn't come free (see box), however, and it doesn't last forever. Chuck Brown, Westin's operations project manager, admits that each in-room office costs $2,000 per unit yet will be outdated within three years, a steep obsolescence curve for an industry that replaces bedding only every ten years.

The long-term prospects of standardization of business rooms or an agreement on pricing seem dim. In fact, says Thomas F. O'Toole, vice president for marketing at Hyatt, the confusion will get worse in the years to come. "Some travelers will carry their offices with them," he observes. "Others will demand to have it waiting in their rooms, and still others will be content to go to the business center. There won't be just one room of the future, but several levels of rooms based on a business traveler's particular degree of sophistication."

Pretty scary talk when it comes from a bunch of guys who can't even get together on the location of the power switch on a guest-room lamp.