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Learning center / Acoustics by building type / Hotel lobby and ballroom

Acoustic panels for hotel lobbies: the complete guide

What makes hotel lobbies noisy, which panels fix it, and how to plan treatment from start to finish.

2 minute read · Updated Nov 2026

Grand spaces that still feel calm and welcoming. Acoustic panels do that by absorbing sound energy that would otherwise bounce between hard surfaces. In hotel lobbies the main sound sources are guests, luggage, events and the sound system, and the most common complaints are that stone floors and high ceilings make the lobby boom, check-in conversations carry, and that ballroom speeches are unclear.

What is going wrong in the room

Every hard surface reflects sound. When a room has a lot of them, each sound keeps bouncing for a long time and overlaps the next one. That build-up is called reverberation, and it is measured as RT60: the time it takes a sound to fade by 60 decibels. A typical hotel lobby of 60 × 40 ft with a 20 ft ceiling has a volume of about 48,000 ft³. With hard and bare surfaces (tile, concrete, glass and little soft furniture), its echo time is about 5.35 seconds. The target for hotel lobbies is 1.00 seconds.

What panels can and cannot do

  • Panels can shorten reverberation, remove flutter echo, make speech clearer and lower the overall noise level that builds up in the room.
  • Panels cannot stop sound passing through walls, floors or doors. That is soundproofing, which needs mass, airtightness and isolation. See soundproofing and STC for hotel lobbies.

The recommended starting point

For a hotel lobby like the one above, we suggest about 69 60 in round round ceiling cloud, 2 in thicks, which brings the echo time down to about 0.99 s. That is roughly 34% of the wall area if the panels went on the walls. A good split for hotel lobbies is about 50% on walls and 50% on the ceiling.

Open the designer with this setup loaded, or browse ready-made models on our hotel lobby and ballroom solutions page.

Plan it in five steps

  1. Measure the room and note what the floor, walls and ceiling are made of.
  2. Work out how many panels you need with the room calculator or the worked example for hotel lobbies.
  3. Decide where they go, starting with the placement guide.
  4. Choose thickness, fabric and color to suit the room and its cleaning needs.
  5. Check the fire and code requirements before you order.

Guides for hotel lobbies