Hilton Worldwide next year will start retrofitting many of its U.S. hotels with door locks that will enable guests to use their smartphones as room keys, marking what appears to be the largest commitment to such technology by a major hotelier to date.
Hilton will also start letting its loyalty-program members choose their rooms from a list of floor plans within the next few months.
The door-lock functionality, which will also let guests skip the front desk for check-in, will be added at all U.S. hotels under four of Hilton's brands, Hilton said last week, though the company didn't disclose which brands.
Most of Hilton's more than 4,000 hotels worldwide will add that feature by the end of 2016.
"Travelers can use their smartphones as boarding passes to get to their seats on an airplane, so it is only natural that they will want to use them as a way to enter their hotel rooms," said Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta in a June 28 statement. "We are developing proprietary technology that is safe and reliable for our guests to use, and cost-effective for our hotels to install."
The efficiency gains of using smartphones as room keys have been increasingly topical among hoteliers and industry analysts of late.
Starwood Hotels & Resorts announced plans earlier this year to debut a pilot program at a handful of hotels in which Starwood Preferred Guest members could use their smartphones as room keys.
The hotelier, which was working with Swedish lock-maker Assa Abloy to develop the program, said in January that it planned to roll out smartphone check-in and room entry to all of its Aloft and W hotels by next year.
And in June, HotelTonight, the last-minute mobile hotel-booking app maker whose investors include Starwood Capital CEO Barry Sternlicht, said it was working with Brivo Labs on a keyless-entry smartphone app. HotelTonight co-founder and operating chief Jared Simon said at the time that his company was in talks with several hotels about trying the product.
Hampering adoption so far is both the expense involved in retrofitting hotel-room door locks to allow for smartphone-key use and concerns over security issues. Hilton declined to say how much the retrofits would cost or how much it would contribute to the cost of the upgrades.
Additionally, it remains to be seen how quickly guests will adopt such a feature, said Bjorn Hanson, divisional dean at New York University's Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management.
"The best feature of mobile check-in is just to give those travelers who are looking for that option the choice of doing so," Hanson said. "It's best when it's a choice, but not a requirement. People at the end of a trip aren't always looking to experiment and try something that may or may not work."