Robot check-in: The hotel concierge goes hi-tech (BBC)
It will be staffed by 10 life-like robots, with only two flesh-and-blood staff members on the premises.
The robots will greet guests, carry bags, and even clean rooms once a guest leaves. Complete with an eerily realistic female face, they are designed to speak several languages and respond to guest enquiries in the 72-room hotel.
The aim is to create an all-round hi-tech experience, including facial recognition software to open doors.
Hotels are already equipping their doors for the future — Examining technologies that can bring “non-stop check-in” to hotels at Hospitality Net.
The contenders:
Author Keith Gruen breaks down the pros and cons.
Tequila at your fingertips: cashless clubbing arrives in Ibiza, is this the most dangerous technology ever? (Daily Mail)
Ibiza die-hards are always looking for the next big thing, and at the moment this is it.
Much cooler than an all-inclusive wrist-band, this cashless system lets showy guests pay for anything at the hotel with a swipe of their fingers, a brilliant way to impress.
And as one of the hottest new party destinations in Ibiza, the five star options are pretty extensive.
John has a great post about biometrics in hotels at the M2SYS blog. It looks like fingerprint room access is finally becoming a reality.
Use of Biometrics for Hotel Room Access Portends Strong Potential for Market (M2SYS Blog)
Seems that CADD Emirates out of the United Arab Emirates has implemented a hotel patron biometrics identification system that is replacing electronic key cards. The idea is to ditch the infamous electronic swipe cards that we all know so well in place of a biometric fingerprinting system that scans hotel patrons and allows them access to their rooms by placing their finger on a device, presumably attached to the hotel room door (the article didn’t go into a lot of details about the infrastructure of the deployment). The hotel hopes that , “the system will be able to remember guest preferences from hotel-to-hotel in locations across the globe, with information saved against their fingerprints.”
Read the whole thing.
I’m no hotelier but the management of a hotel seems to entail a multitude of tasks where biometrics could make things a lot easier, yet news of hotels adopting biometric solutions has been so scant that we’ve only used our ‘hotel’ label once.
Ibiza Hotel Trials Fingerprint Payment (Wall Street Journal)
It could be the solution to the age-old vacation question: Where do you put your wallet when you are dressed for the pool? Ibiza hotel Ushuaïa Beach claims to be the first in the world to introduce a fingerprint payment system.
Guests register their fingerprints to one or more credit cards. They can then pay for food, drinks and services simply by touching two fingers to a biometric reader.
This deployment reminds me of the Zoom Tan system.