Among all of the amazing things your smartphone can do for you, now it can also be used as your hotel room key—as long as you stay at a hotel part of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, that is. The chain is expanding on its mobile app with a “virtual room key,” that will allow guests to skip the check-in lines altogether.
The idea for keyless check-in has been around for a while, with companies such as Apple filing patents for such ideas as far back as 2010, so it’s a bit odd that it’s taken so long for somebody to develop it.
Using Starwood’s app, your smartphone becomes both your payment method and your room key, solving the pesky problem of remembering to carry around a plastic keycard. Just remember to keep a vice grip on your smartphone; considering how much it does for you nowadays being locked out of your hotel room would be the least of your worries
The system is refreshingly simple, using Bluetooth to work with any 4S or higher iPhone or 4.3 or newer Android systems. The Bluetooth connects to a sensor on the hotel door that activates or opens its lock, battery-powered so you can get into your room even if the hotel’s computer system crashes.
Simple, neat and efficient. I like it
Traditional check-in and room keys, where you stand in line and interact with other humans, will still be available for those of you who are reluctant to give your smartphone even more power—a qualm which, for me, normally lasts around eleven seconds before I cave.
Starwood will be debuting their new app and accompanying virtual check-in sometime this year, in their Aloft hotels in Harlem, New York and Cupertino, California.
The chain hopes that this feature will eventually be available for all of their hotels, and thinks the idea will be incredibly successful for the hotel business. According to a statement made by the company’s CEO Frits van Paasschen in the Wall Street Journal, they believe that virtual check-in and virtual room keys will soon become “the new standard for how people will want to enter a hotel.”
Let’s hope so. Check-in lines are the worst .
Source Mashable
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