Posted on: February 3, 2014

Starwood will test program for check-in via smartphone

By Danny King

Starwood Hotels & Resorts this spring will start a pilot program in which guests can skip the front-desk check-in process and use their smartphones to open their hotel room doors without a key.

The move reflects an effort by lodging operators to redeploy space and labor resources to better serve a younger, more connected clientele.

Starwood said last week that its first hotels to have the feature will be New York's Aloft Harlem and Northern California's Aloft Cupertino. Starwood Preferred Guest members who sign up for the program will be able to use their smartphones for check-in and room entry at those hotels within the next three months.

The company also released a one-minute video showing a prospective hotel guest bypassing the front desk for check-in, going to her hotel room, holding her smartphone about a foot away from the lock and opening the door.

By pushing the program, Starwood is responding to surging smartphone-ownership rates among U.S. travelers. Among American travelers who regularly booked reservations on the Internet, 75% owned a smartphone last year, up from 52% in 2011, according to PhoCusWright.

The Starwood program also dovetails with a broader effort by hotel operators and developers to limit or eliminate the need to commit labor resources to more traditional services like guest check-in and room service while encouraging communal guest interaction.

Such design components will become more commonplace as developers look to better serve millennial travelers while cutting costs, panelists said at the Americas Lodging Investment Summit in Los Angeles last week.

For instance, automated check-in kiosks are supplanting front desks, while communal tables are replacing private dining rooms, eliminating the need for minibars and room service in the process, said the panelists, which included executives with Marriott International, Yotel and global design firm Wimberly Interiors.

As a result, hotel employees will be required to mirror the flexibility of the hotel's common space, serving at once as concierges, social coordinators and culinary experts.

Both Marriott Global Brand Manager Brian King and Yotel Chief Development Officer Jason Brown cited the success of their respective hotels as proof that lodging operators that pulled guests out of their rooms and into their common areas were better serving their guests.

King noted that the communal tables at Marriott's Courtyard properties are often the most popular.

Meanwhile, Brown cited Yotel's streamlined guest check-in process, addressed by the Starwood program, noting that Yotel New York's automated check-in kiosks free up the property's employees for other purposes. He added that the hotel's flexible social space was another reason why guests have embraced the property's hyper-designed, 170-square-foot guestrooms and have spurred the 669-room hotel's 95% occupancy rate.

"You don't know how many times we heard, 'you can't operate a 700-room hotel in New York without a dedicated meeting space or minibar. No one will show up,'" said Brown, whose property opened in 2011. "We're placing our bet on flexibility."

"Service is going to move from transactional to content-driven," added King. "People want to know where the food from the restaurant is being sourced. No one would've asked that 15 years ago."

Hotel operators and developers are looking for ways to boost design efficiency just as the sector emerges from a period of near-stagnant U.S. supply growth in the wake of the most recent economic downturn. As of last fall, there were 710 U.S. hotels under construction totaling almost 71,000 rooms, which marked a 30% increase over the number of rooms under construction a year earlier, according to Lodging Econometrics.

Additionally, almost 60% of the rooms in the U.S. hotel-construction pipeline fall in the upper-upscale, upscale and upper-midscale sectors largely frequented by younger professionals.

With that in mind, summit panelist and Wimberly Interiors Vice President of Strategy Raj Chandnani said hotel developers would be best served to practice what he called "the democratization of design" by laying out a hotel where guests are guaranteed to interact with one another.

As for Starwood, the company is working with Sweden-based lock maker Assa Abloy at developing the program and is looking to roll out the feature to all Aloft and W hotels by next year. The company declined to say how much it was spending on the feature.