To clarify one thing at the very beginning: the hospitable part of check-in can be a very sophisticated “welcome theatre” and an extremely important part of the whole hotel experience. Or it can be almost nonexistent, like in short term rentals or hybrids like Sonder, Numa, Limehome etc. Or it can be anything in between. This depends mainly on business model, and each has its place.
Our goal is to improve the transactional part of the check-in process, the part everybody hates.
This part consists of mainly three buckets:
- Guest registration & ID verification according to local legal requirements
- Payment
- Room allocation and issuing of room keys
And each of these buckets comes with its own bunch of challenges.
1. Guest Registration & ID Verification
This one is annoying. The dreaded registration card, copy of passport, perhaps for the whole family. Often a combination of manual paperwork and eyebrow-raising privacy implications (“Do they really need passport copies? Of my whole family? What are they doing with it?”).
For the hotel the job is clear: figure out who is my guest, fulfill legal requirements in this regard – and make this whole procedure as painless and quick as possible!
Step one on this road is to at least take this effort away from arrival at the hotel. Travelers usually have a lot of time in transit, so there are many situations where they can fill out what has to be filled out. Plus they can do so on their own device, where most parts of the necessary details are ready via autofill functionality.
But what about the needed ID verification, required to be done by the hotels in many countries? Well, also here technology is finally getting up to the task: many states are issuing some form of digital IDs, and with EUDI knocking on the door, very soon every EU citizen will have one in their wallet.
Verifying ID and providing all required registration details will be done with a confirming click upfront or a tap in the hotel. Theoretically. Because practically, the technology on the hotel side needs to be prepared and ready for this, being able to work with a variety of digital IDs, fully integrated in the complete check-in process.
2. Payment
And here is the second topic, and quite an important one as well. Not only are there many different payment methods to be offered, there are also a lot of different payment policies to be managed. Paid upfront? Partly paid upfront? Payment method on file? Pre authorized? Also for in-stay consumption and booked to the room/folio? As a percentage of room rate or fixed amount per day? Also for loyalty guests? On which tier? Everything to one invoice or split? Is online payment and pre-auth technically possible or only via card present transactions?
The goal is to cover as much as possible from the almost endless longtail of edge cases. The solution? A system flexible and open for configuration in every thinkable way. And even in every currently unthinkable way, because new requirements will show up for sure.
3. Room Key
After taking care of registration and payment, one “minor” issue still has to be solved: how can we provide a room key to the guest? At least for this there is no way around for the guest to go to the frontdesk, prove that it is him staying at room 204 and wait for the key to be prepared? Not really.
First, there is a very closely related industry who has to face this challenge since years – short term rentals. Some solve it with keypads and changing codes, some with some kind of mechanics on top of existing locks (eg. Nuki), some with more analog ways of solutions (eg. the bar next door).
So it is obviously doable – but none of this solutions is really viable for a 150 room hotel with existing RFID based door locks. Which for this sizes is the vast majority of cases. But again, technology is knocking at the door: wallet keys, using NFC are the perfect future solution.
Most (if not all) of the new locks will come with this functionality, transforming smartphones into keycards. Also many existing locks offer the possibility for a cost effective retrofit.
However, it is also reality that not all hotels will have the budget available for either replacing older locks or doing the retrofit. This is where kiosks provide the perfect alternative – either enabling the complete check-in procedure, including passport scan and payment terminal. Or, just issuing the roomkey, thus solving the last transactional step in the arrival journey.
4. Social challenge
What often is a bit overlooked, is the social/behavioral aspect of this development. The arrival procedure as it is is annoying. But it is also well known. Which btw is no wonder because it is essentially the same since many decades.
People go through the front door, try to localize the reception and go straight there. If there is no front desk, a first slight confusion arises. It should be made very clear – by design – what to do. It is not unsimilar to the situation when the first kiosk at airports came up. In most airports, they were kind of semi self-service – most of them had an employee next to it, guiding the passenger through check-in steps.
This solved actually two problems: First, it made clear what to do (check-in here). And second, by offering support pro-actively this also reduced the reluctance to ask for help while being afraid of feeling embarrassed in public when not knowing how to do the procedure as a first timer.
It is no surprise, that the chain most successfully introducing self check-in already many years ago (CitizenM) followed more or less exactly this model.
And it is also no surprise that today an overwhelming majority of passengers prefer the DIY version of check-in for flights, either at home or latest at the airports. Always enjoying the freedom and independence of doing it on their own, without the unnecessary time spend waiting for somebody else doing it – slower and with misspellings included.
One more thing to consider: hotels are not on another planet, they are part of daily life. And as such, they benefit from the “learning curve” caused by more and more situations with similar interactions.
Placing orders at Mc Donalds, getting tickets for public transportation, using apple pay … Or, more related to travel, moving through passport checks at the airport via biometric match or registering online for a stay at a short term rental.
All this makes self-service based and digital enabled interactions for transactional tasks more common – and increasingly also more expected.
Summary
Digital IDs, online payments, wallet keys – all this will lead to a steep increase of adoption during the next 2–3 years. And it will finally remove the annoying parts of check-in, drastically reducing the time blocked with administration on the hotels side as well.
The one thing which will not magically disappear however is the technological challenge in the background, but that’s another story.
Actually, that’s our story.
We fix check-in across systems, legislations, payment methods and lock technologies. Whatever it takes.