From September next year, about 100 students will be trained at the hotel at any one time, with many courses held over the summer.

Its Bistro 1979 bar - named after the year the school was founded - will be run solely by students as a commercial venture. Other parts of the hotel will employ qualified and experienced hotel staff, who will be regularly shadowed by students seeking to learn about various aspects of the hospitality trade.

Judy Hou Chia-huei, director of human capital, said the hotel would provide postgraduate students with a rare opportunity to study and work in a commercial environment.

Master's students were typically looking for research and data collection opportunities to provide detailed and up-to-date information for their dissertations.

'Most of the requests from master's and PhD students are for research and data,' Hou said. 'So they come and interview us at work or do observations of the different sections. The research fields can be marketing, a human resources project or hospitality education.

'They can come for a front-of-the house observation, or to the back of the house, to view the side the guests never get to see: preparation, housekeeping and engineering. Then there is the human resources side, the accounting and so forth.'

Facilities that will be available to students include Western and Eastern cuisine production laboratories as well as bakery and pastry centres.

Students can also use the reading and learning areas of the Che-woo Lui Hotel and Tourism Research Centre, which will house units for research into tourism on the mainland and for hospitality research and development.

Hou said employment prospects for hotel and tourism postgraduates were good in Hong Kong and on the mainland, and that Hotel Icon's graduates would be well prepared to return to work as they would never have left the hotel environment.

'There is a huge drought here in Asia for hotel and tourism industry professionals,' she said. 'Just look at Hong Kong. There are tens of thousands of mainland tourists coming every year. Next year, the Ritz-Carlton and two smaller hotels are opening in Hong Kong as well as Hotel Icon.'

She said one major hotel chain alone was seeking between 100 and 150 general managers for the mainland over the next five to 10 years, and many of the master's students would be looking for such positions.

Promotional opportunities were expected to be particularly good on the mainland, where there was a shortage of senior hotel managers because of the rapid expansion of the hospitality industry in recent years.

Both Hou, who has been based in Hong Kong for a year, and Richard Hatter, general manager at Hotel Icon, have years of commercial hotel experience. Hatter was with the Shangri-La chain for 17 years and Hou used to work for the Mandarin Oriental.

PolyU's School of Hotel and Tourism Management was ranked second in the world after Cornell University in the United States last year by the Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research.

Professor Kaye Chon Kye-sung, the school's director, said special facilities at Hotel Icon that could be used by master's students included the Vinoteca Lab, a wine laboratory that would train students to take part in Hong Kong's growing role as a wine hub.

There are also three prototype guest rooms where tradition will be thrown to the wind. Students will have the opportunity to investigate new ways of providing accommodation with a difference.

'You can dismantle and reorganise all the furniture,' Chon said. 'The hotel trade is very much a tradition-based industry. The bathroom, wardrobe, bed - it all follows a cookie-cutter format. We want to challenge that tradition. Each of the three rooms will have different themes.'

The themes will include technological elements - temperature control systems that change the smell of the room to suit the guest. Beds will be adjustable to suit the guest's instructions - soft, hard, the type of pillows and so on.

'I sleep better when I hear raindrops, so you could easily create that with new technology,' Chon said. 'The three rooms - one is about design, another is about new technology - introducing a new way of doing things.

'How about having the bed away from the wall, or the bathtub in the middle of the room? Many hotel companies want to do this, but they can't take the risk in case they annoy the customer. But this is a teaching and research hotel, so customers will be more understanding.'

Chon said other ideas included a wandering alarm clock for sleepy guests. 'Sometimes you are so tired that you just switch it off. Imagine having an alarm clock that moves around the room and then you have to chase it,' he said.

That experiment is still continuing.