Skipping The Front Desk

Technology capabilities have for years been outpacing real life adoption. The gap seems to be widening as on the technology front we are talking now about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) while simple everyday things just don't work.

Last week the airline lost my luggage and the recovery started nicely as I got a personalized message indicating they had already found it and it was n its way. The message prompted me to a simple web form to enter my temporary address they should deliver the bag to. This was all on Oct 28. i was staying at the hotel for 2 nights, so I put Oct 30 in the form.

Early morning on the next day (Oct 29) I got a notification asking about the baggage delivery, as I was supposedly "about to leave the temporary address". Surprised, I went back to the form which was indeed showing Oct 29. I was sure I entered Oct 30... But OK, I did this again. Picked Oct 30 from a nicely crafted date picker. The form was still showing Oct 29 The regular tricks such as reloading the page and restarting the browser did not help. So I tried picking Oct 31. The date on the form moved to Oct 30. Clearly the script was subtracting a day from what was entered in the date picker. Bummer...

So I was very surprised on the following day when I landed in Seattle in the morning of October 30 to attend the COSM conference. In the World Of Hyatt app the check-in option was active. I'm generally skeptical about hotel apps, as historically there was not much they could offer. There was always the need to show up at the front desk to present an ID and a credit card (physical!) to have the digital key enabled.

This time it was different. I completed the check-in while riding from the airport and it offered to upload the digital key to the Apple Wallet. So I proceeded directly from the Uber car to the room. And opened the door with the phone.

OK this probably does not sound like anything cutting-edge (a proper NFC tag was uploaded to the phone), but this was the first time in my life when I was actually able to skip the front desk entirely.

Those hotel check-ins have always been a bit annoying, as very often while making a reservation you give them all the data and then they require to provide it again, with a paper signature and a physical credit card. And typically there is a line. So being able to go directly to the room is really nice. Some 10 years after NFC has become present in phones...