While many of San Francisco's most renowned hotels continue to reflect the city's iconic history, some Silicon Valley properties are staying true to the region's technology-oriented form by serving as a Petri dish for hospitality-related technology advances.
The most notable of these could be Starwood Hotels' Aloft Cupertino, which is appropriately located about five blocks south of Apple Inc.'s headquarters. That property, which this summer made news for employing a robotic butler (aka "Botler"), was also one of two trial hotels (the Aloft Harlem in New York was the other) for a keyless-entry feature that enables smartphone-toting guests to skip the front-desk check-in process and use the phones as electronic room keys.
The feature, called SPG Keyless, goes live at 10 hotels this week, including the two trial hotels as well as properties such as W-branded hotels in Hollywood, Calif.; New York; Hong Kong; and Doha, Qatar, and at New York's Element Times Square.
The feature is available to Starwood's SPG loyalty guests who register their iPhone or Android phones through the SPG app to allow for so-called "push notifications" and who opt in for the SPG Keyless program.
Once registered, guests are notified when their room is ready, and that they're checked in. At that point, the guests can go to their rooms, open the SPG app and hold the phone about two or three inches away from the 3-inch-by-2-inch faceplate on the hotel-room's door lock. The phone, which uses Bluetooth low-energy technology to transmit information to the lock, will buzz, the lock light will turn green and the door will open.
Starwood, which is having Sweden-based lockmaker Assa Abloy retrofit participating hotels, will expand the feature to about 150 worldwide Aloft, Element and W-branded hotels totaling some 30,000 rooms by early next year.