Starwood Hotels & Resorts and Hilton Worldwide last week each announced plans to offer their loyalty-program members the option to skip front-desk check-in and use their smartphones as room keys.
Starwoodwent live with the feature Nov. 3 at 10 hotels, including California's Aloft Cupertino and New York's Aloft Harlem as well as W-branded hotels in Hollywood, Calif.; New York; Hong Kong; and Singapore.
Starwood will expand the feature, which is available to its SPG loyalty guests, to about 150 Aloft, Element and W-branded hotels worldwide, totaling about 30,000 rooms, by early next year.
Meanwhile, Hilton will start offering a similar feature to its Hilton HHonors loyalty members staying at Conrad-branded luxury hotels in the U.S. early next year, and will do the same at its Hilton, Waldorf Astoria and recently announced Canopy brands by next summer.
The feature, which will also enable guests to use their Android and Apple smartphones as keys to hotel gyms, executive floors and parking facilities, will be expanded to 11 Hilton brands worldwide in 2016.
Keyless entry has been discussed as an inevitable technology development by both hoteliers and industry analysts in the past few years but hasn't been available to the general public until now. Representatives with both Hyatt Hotels and InterContinental Hotels Group said last week that they're running pilot programs at a limited number of hotels for keyless-entry systems. And last month, Best Western International said the Vib brand it has under development would include mobile check-in.
While Starwood and Hilton are pitching the feature as a way to both ease the check-in process for guests and free up front-desk employees for other tasks, Starwood is touting its first-mover position, while Hilton says its keyless-entry program will be the world's most widespread when it goes companywide in two years.
The consensus of Bjorn Hanson, former dean of NYU's Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management, and associate professor Chris Anderson of the Cornell School of Hotel Administration was that in addition to the convenience issue, the features are valuable in that they enable hoteliers to demonstrate a willingness to employ advanced technology.
"Mobile check-in/checkout and keyless entry are critical for millennials," Anderson said. "The true advantage will come to the brand that completes a full rollout. … Consistency of availability will be critical."
Under Starwood's program, SPG guests who register their iPhone or Android phones for the service are notified when their room is ready and informed that they have been checked in. At that point, guests can go to their room, open the SPG app and hold the phone about two or three inches away from the 3-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, in its Q3 earnings call, estimated that new initiatives would boost general and administrative costs by as much as $8 million this year. Starwood CFO Tom Mangas described the keyless entry introduction as a "primary" initiative.
"This is a small investment in something we know will make a huge impact on our guest experience," said Chris Holdren, senior vice president of Starwood's SPG and digital operations.
Dustin Bomar, Hilton's vice president of digital acquisition, said, "It's been a massive investment on our part to upgrade Hilton's technology systems to allow for features such as keyless entry. And it gives people at the front desk more time to provide service instead of assigning rooms or cutting keys."