Hotels Consider New Check-In Processes

Unlike airlines, which use printable and mobile boarding passes as their de facto check-in standard, hotel check-in remains a mostly manual process. A few technology suppliers, however, are developing and testing tools to speed it up.

Holiday Inn last year began testing its Mobile Room Key program at two properties in Chicago and Houston and plans to expand the program in early 2012, said vice president of global brand management Verchele Wiggins. The program allows guests to bypass the front desk entirely and use their mobile phones as keys.

Guests prior to arrival receive a text or email that provides their room number along with a toll-free number and a code to dial. Dialing produces an audio chirp that unlocks the door via an audio reader on the lock. Because it’s audio, not visual, any phone—smartphone or otherwise—suffices. The program at the pilot hotels proved particularly popular with business travelers in their 30s and 40s, Wiggins said.

Several Holiday Inns, particularly those in Asia, are eager to implement the technology, according to Wiggins.

"It's not something that all our hotels will want to do or all our guests will want to use," Wiggins said. "We've talked about hotels perhaps doing it on just certain floors. It eventually could be a brand standard, but right now, we're just inviting the people most interested in it."

The program's developer, OpenWays, claims it is in discussion with other "major hotel chains and casinos" in North America and Europe to provide mobile keys.

Other technology firms are developing news ways to streamline, not replace, the check-in process. Intellicheck Mobilisa, for example, has developed the a registration process in which front desk personnel can scan a guest's ID to automatically populate forms and minimize the amount of information entered manually. The company is working with Accor to implement the technology in Motel 6 and Studio 6 properties across North America, Intellicheck Mobilisa CEO Steve Williams said.

While the time difference between scanning and typing might not seem like much to an individual business traveler, it can speed up the check-in process considerably when large groups arrive, according to Williams. "Imagine you have a busload of kids walking in," he said. "You hope not to be that business traveler caught in line behind them."

Even as such technology becomes more widely adopted across the hotel industry, Williams said hotels—particularly upper upscale and luxury hotels—remain reluctant to completely automate check-in. Those hoteliers use that process to capture preferences and information, and sign travelers up for loyalty programs.

A self-check-in kiosk pilot at upper-end hotels a few years ago, for example, did not catch on because "most of those higher-end guys still want that interactions," Williams said.

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Source: BusinessTravelNews