Present Situation Of Hotels & Resorts:

If you visit either a hotel or a holiday resort, the reception staff gives you several things that you have to take care of, in addition to your luggage and personal belongings. They give you a room key, an identification card, one or more breakfast coupons, a bar coupon for some welcome drinks, a health club pass, a casino pass, free tokens, and so on.

You are supposed to keep all this stuff carefully and use it to gain access to all these places in the resort. For the normal leisure traveler, this is very irritating. She has come to a resort, to enjoy, not keep track of various scraps of paper. For the resort, however, this is essential as they have to ensure that genuine guests use the facilities, track usage of the coupons & gather other information.

Problem With This System:

1. Problems of hotels and resortsIt is a pain for the guest to carry all this stuff all the time, in addition to taking care of other essential belongings like cameras.
2. Besides vacation wear may be just a pair of shorts and a T-shirt with no pockets, to keep anything at all. If you are a parent traveling with young children, then you have multiple such coupon sets to take care of.
3. The coupons and access passes are misplaced when you need them, or you realize, when you reach the entertainment venue, that they have been left in your room.
4. These resorts are quite large places and walking back to your room is quite a pain. The hotel staff has to issue and redeem these coupons and passes based on the tariff and meal plans or packages that the guests have bought.
5. This manual system is not easy to manage at all. Reconciliation of used coupons with issued ones is difficult.
6. Hence a lot of useful data (how many guests used which area at what time for what duration) cannot be had. The guests have to sign bills at various restaurants in the complex, to confirm services which they have availed of. For example, if Irfan Ahmed downs three sundowners in the lounge bar, he is presented with a bill, which he signs. This bill is then added to his room bill.

RFID Solution Of Hotels & Resorts:

The RFID solution is to issue an RFID wristband to each guest, including children (other than infants). The wristband contains an RFID tag. The wristbands can be worn like watches and they can be made in any number of colors, designs, and patterns. Also, they can bear the logo of the hotel or resort chain.

The wristband acts like a door key as well as a coupon to all the facilities that the guest is entitled to. For example,

A guest detail can be entered into a database like the following :

Guest Name—Irfan Ahmed
Room No —101
Dates/Time from 12/27/2011 14:00:00 to 12/29/2011 14:00:00
Breakfast: Yes, in a coffee shop, on 12/28/2011, 12/29/2011
Gym: Yes,...
Casino: No
Pool: Yes, but only in the morning from 07:00 hrs to 09:00 hrs.

This programming can be unique for every guest and therefore depending on the guest's fancy, as well as the ability to pay, the hotel can work out infinite such tailored one-of-a-kind package deals. Some guests may fancy the casino more than the gym and the health freaks may require at least a two-hour workout in the gym but no casino and so on. Now when the guest flashes his wristband near his room door, the lock reads the RFID tag inside the band, confirms with the central database that he is entitled to enter room 101 and the door opens. Similarly, the coffee shop entrance has a large reader equipped to detect Irfan’s wristband and allow him access to breakfast. In the evening when Irfan walks down to the casino, the doorkeeper can read on his reader that Irfan is not entitled to free access here and politely informs him that he is not entitled to free entry, but if he wishes to enter it, $50 will get billed to his room account, again, by just flashing his wristband. At all times, Irfan just has to wear his wristband, with which he can also go swimming or skiing since the RFID tag is embedded inside a plastic housing and cannot get wet or cold. Also, the hotel management can get data on his travels inside the resort. Large amounts of such data can then reveal how many facilities offered are popular and how many are not popular. These can then be revamped or shut down. As an additional benefit, the resort can offer guests infinitely varied packages by asking the guest to buy a pre-funded wristband, loaded with say $3000 worth of services. The guest can then either play off this entire amount in the casino or down it all in drinks at the bar, it is entirely up to him. There need not be standard offers like AP, EP, bed and breakfast only, etc.

Future Scenarios Of Hotels & Resorts:

There have been successful implementations of this system at some US resorts. This may soon become the standard method of operation. Just as those bulky room keys and manual locks, got replaced by magnetic swipe card keys, so also will RFID wrist bands replace the magnetic swipe cards. One can imagine that within the next five years, there will be hundreds of hotels & resorts that would want to upgrade their systems to RFID wristbands.