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Hotel Chain Plans Phone-Based Check-in and Room Access
GTRacer writes: Forbes reports that Hilton Worldwide, international hotel operator, is rolling out smartphone-based guest tools allowing self-service check-in, access to a virtual floorplan to select a room, and (in 2015) actual door access once checked in. The author states the drive for this technology is the growing influence of the swelling ranks of Millennials, who "[...] have a very strong inclination toward automated and self-service customer service." The security risks seem obvious, though.
"Ah crap, my phone just died... I'll charge it when I get back to the hotel roo-- shit."
I'm so sick of things being "automated" at the expense of the customer. Fucking Self-Checkouts everywhere - companies get to lay off a few dozen workers per location, replace with buggy scanning hardware & software. Sure it takes the customer a longer time, but that's just more time for them to look at impulse buy and sell their children more candy at the checkout. It's not making it any more convenient, or quick, for me or anyone else in line - it's making it so the anti-social behind the monitor type Millennials don't have to talk to actual people. My wife is one of those - she can't even make a fucking phone call if there's a chance company X has a "WebChat!"
hacked tomorrow.
great idea.
The check-in part at least is nothing new, Fairmont has offered email check-in/out for a few years at least.
when you dare use a competitors hotel. The bigger the competitor, the bigger the annoyance your phone will be to you until you relent and return to the fold.
Sorry, the is no frigging chance that this will get installed on my phone and I spend on average 200 nighes a year in the bloody things.
So, free hotel rooms for all at the next blackhat conference >:D
It's not like hotel door locks are secure. You're just trading off one big fail for another.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Given that hotel keying tends toward assorted mag-stripe flavors, which are certainly more obscure than RFID/NFC(mag stripe readers and writers aren't terribly expensive or in any way controlled; but nobody is pushing to build them in to random consumer electronics); but which have only whatever testing the vendor gave them and security-through-obscurity, I'm not seeing why the security risks would necessarily be 'obvious'.
Yes, connecting anything to the network raises the stakes; but I'd be shocked if the existing systems are exactly flawless, even ignoring the human element of social engineering the front desk staff or the practice of finding the cheapest maids available and issuing them full access for room cleaning...
This will probably go poorly; but it might actually go poorly in a visible enough way that they have to fix it or risk embarassment/lawsuits, rather than just having it go poorly more or less forever.
Does this mean that if I meet a woman in the hotel bar, we can touch phones and use NFC to give her a key to my room? Sexy!
They've had automated check in in Europe for some hotels for 25 years. The locked entrance has an ATM-like machine in the little foyer. Put in your credit card, pick a room type, and it printed a slip with codes for the front door and your room.
And yes, they had a live person on site -- it ate my card and the call button got her out of bed at 3 am to get it. :)
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I don't get what the article's author is thinking, exactly. There have been dozens upon dozens of articles written about how millennials aren't doing things - they aren't buying cars (except cheap used ones), they aren't buying houses, they aren't getting married. As someone who is under 30 and technically a millennial, I can attest to this. I know exactly zero people under the age of thirty who have jobs that pay $20 or more an hour - the highest I've seen is $17.50, for a girl who works one cube over from me.
I'm a temp who gets paid $10 an hour to do half the workload of a person who gets paid several times what I do and drives a Lexus to work, on top of some pointless data entry that is supposed to be done by an automated program (but isn't because they're taking forever to code it). Six months (and counting) at the same place, where I've been told I have exactly zero chance of ever getting hired on a permanent basis for actual money. I don't exactly make enough money to be financially independent, let alone go out on trips and stay at hotels. Between student loan payments, car insurance payments, and going back to school in the fall (I have a BA but it's not doing me any good) I have a net income of very, very little.
To me, this sounds more like "We had millenials working our hotels for minimum wage, let's get rid of them and replace them with an automated system. That way, we don't have to pay them."
Why put off until tomorrow what you can do today?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"Security risks" from people self-subscribing to hotel door access?
Some would call this a "Profitable vulnerabilities" situation.
-kgj
Your room temperature is set for one hundred and ten degrees. Twenty lobster dinners and fifty bottles of Dom will be delivered shortly. Thank you for your patronage.
The last dotcom boom seemed to be mostly about eyeballs and getting people on the web. Now the popular meme is that Millenials are the new hot group to market to, and they are constantly glued to their smartphone of choice 24/7. However, just like the popular images of the fedora-wearing tech hipster and others, how much does this picture of a hyper-connected, distracted, wants-to-be-advertised-to-24/7 Millenial match with actual people?
Sure, you can easily point out tons of people watching movies on their 4" screens, listening to music through tiny earbuds and devouring social media. I'm just not sure _everyone_ under 30 is like that. Stories like this that predict a relatively small technology enhancement will fundamentally change the nature of commerce were pretty common at the end of the last boom too. Couple that with some of the (admittedly less insane) IPOs lately and billion dollar valuations on websites that don't make money right now, and you're looking at the last gasps of inflation for Bubble 2.0. My prediction is that social media, tablets, apps and so on will live on, but they're going to be less front-and-center in peoples' lives as people get tired of it. Everyone I've ever talked to who has an iPad or other tablet says the same thing -- it's a good content consumption device but they still need a computer for anything more complex than email.
The security implications of hotel room access through smartphone could be interesting. Done properly, it's probably as safe as Prox badges or traditional keys. However, given that this is a large hotel chain, I guarantee they're going to farm the app development out to the rock-bottom bidder. This happens all the time with large companies that say, "OMG we need tablet and phone apps NOW!!" It's kind of a given that version 1.0 is going to have problems...plus, I'm not sure everyone is so averse to dealing with people that they would want to check into a hotel without stopping at the front desk. (Hint: If you're not a jerk to the front desk staff, and ask for something cheap like a room upgrade, you're likely to get it, which is something an app's business logic won't do unless you're Triple Executive Platinum 1K Plus.)
Shouldn't there be something along the lines of
it hasn't taken much more than a text message to get inside Paris Hilton for years
By now?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
It was the same for everyone in their 20s. What do you expect , a $100K pay packet the minute you leave university? I'm in my 40s now but I spent most of my 20s working in dead end IT jobs and saving up until I could put down a deposit for a mortgage.
Seems all the millenial generation does is whinge about how tough there life is. Get over yourselves FFS!
Any "convenience" on our part is charged a fee even though it saves the business money in not having to hire someone to deal with it.
An exxample:
The Atlanta Symphony.
I could walk over and catch the person they hired to sell tickets during their limited hours - which isn't during my lunchtime - or I could buy on-line there by cutting out the overhead of a person and yet get charged for a "convenience" fee because I was forced to buy when there wasn't a clerk.
See?
Web shit saves money but yet I am charged for a "convenience" fee even though going through the web saves everyone time and money.
Yeah, Capitalism.
Oh! The Atlanta Ballet and symphony had the nerve to call me for donations.
They can get it out of their outsourced asses for all I fucking care!
I suspect they won't be getting an endorsement from Erin Edwards...
Anything that makes check-in faster. If I made a reservation for the room, the hotel already has my info in the system. Being able to finalize my checkin with a few swipes of my phone instead of waiting for a person to become available sounds good to me. My biggest concern is the hotel having a secure enough app (and infrastructure) to make it hard for people to crack the system and/or spoof my room key.
You'd be surprised just how many people claim they have the president's suite... And who have the access to it to prove it!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Already done here: http://www.omenahotels.com/
It's cheap, the rooms are okay and all of them can't possibly be right next to a loud air conditioning unit .
Now I can slum in High Comfort nearly anywhere, well anywhere where my payers want to put me for a 'job', at zero cost to me and zero cost to my payers.
Sweet!
Made my Friday.
Toodles.
I'd like to be able to skip the whole "check in" thing. If I'm on some long-haul road trip, the last thing I want to do at 11pm is be depressed by interacting with someone who's life has led them to working the swing shift at the Super8 at some crossroads in BFE. It'd be great if I could get a Moons Over My Hammy at Dennys while I figure out which room is most isolated and book it. Drive across the street to the hotel, go straight to my room, crash for 8-9 hours, shower, $5 tip for the maid, back in the car, on my way having never had to interact with anyone at the motel.
In fact, to heck with Dennys. Bring back the automat. With self-service gas stations, hotels, and food, I could cross the country without ever interacting with a single person. Bliss. For me and everyone else.
I can't afford to retire.
After the last divorce where I was painted at the evil bastard for not being there for her (I was ill with Cancer) she took just about everything. I did manage to win one thing and that was not to pay her Alimony because she was a $200K a year Exec and because of my cancer I'm almost unemployable.
I just about have enough to live on from a job without healthcare and no prospects. Thank god for the VA.
Who are the lucky ones now eh?
Never say "the risks seem obvious." They're not, obviously -- demonstrated by the fact that at least one company thinks it's a good idea. So why don't you state what you think is obvious and we'll have something discuss?
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Everyone has a smartphone these days. And I don't know about you, but I like the idea of not having to wait 20 minutes to check in or out while some dude at the front of the line wastes everyone's time by being "social".