Holiday Inn looking to ditch room keys and use their smartphone instead

Now I’m not sure if this is an improvement or not since I don’t travel and staying at hotels isn’t high on my list of things I do on a regular basis but I am sure that there will be some who will like this idea.

Next month the InterContinental Hotels Group, owners of the Holiday Inn chain, is going to begin testing new technology that will let people unlock their hotel rooms with their smartphones instead of using a key or key card.

“The holy grail item for us is to simplify the room-key hand-off moment at the hotel,” IHG exec Bryson Koehler told me Friday. IHG thinks that the smartphone just might be the answer.

The proliferation of smartphones is growing in such a way that we have to look at what people are already bringing with them to make their stay more enjoyable,” he said. “We don’t need to burden people with additional items; it just clutters up their lives. The beauty of the smart phone is that they’ve already got it.”

Source: USA Today

The initial test Holiday Inn’s being included in the test are: Holiday Inn Chicago O’Hare Rosemont and Holiday Inn Express Houston Downtown Convention Center. The experiment will run a minimum of 60 to 90 days.