Hospitality is one of the world’s fastest-growing industries, and biometrics is the latest technology that’s revolutionizing it. Here’s how hospitality outfits are using this innovative tech to improve guest experience, safety, and security.
Guests can easily pay for additional hotel services like spa treatments or in-room entertainment with their fingerprint, eliminating the need to carry cash and cards around.
Personalized Experience
The hospitality industry often faces a convenience-security trade-off. Biometrics are a way to strike the right balance for hotels. For instance, by requiring fingerprint or facial scanning to gain access to guest rooms, you can prevent the need for guests to carry key cards that could be lost or stolen. You can also automate staff timekeeping, ensuring that all employees work their assigned shifts and that your hotel is compliant with local labor laws.
When guests use their biometric identifiers to sign for additional in-house services, it’s easy to keep track of what they’ve used and what their preferences are. That way, hotel staff can offer them the exact experience they want without having to repeat themselves or ask them to provide additional information.
For example, a child visiting a family vacationing in the same hotel might have different preferences from the adult. By linking a child’s fingerprint to the parent, all of that information can be instantly fetched and used during future visits. Requiring a fingerprint to authorize any additional payments for in-room food and drinks, spa treatments, or purchasing in-room entertainment makes it easy to speed up check-out and eliminates the chance of fraudulent purchases. This is particularly important for hospitality businesses that handle large volumes of cash or credit cards, such as casinos. Moreover, a decentralized biometric system can protect your business from cyberattacks by removing the need for centralized authentication points and passwords that could be compromised.
Convenient Check-In
Biometrics can make the check-in process much more convenient for your guests, freeing them from the need to bring their passport or other forms of identity. This means they can spend less time waiting around to check-in and more of their vacation enjoying your hotel’s amenities, leading to greater customer loyalty.
Adding biometrics to your hospitality management systems can help with other guest services too, such as restaurant and spa reservations, room service calls and more. You can even implement facial recognition technology to enable mobile check-in for your hotel customers, allowing them to simply show their face when they arrive to verify their identity and instantly be checked in.
Hospitality staff also benefit from the use of fingerprint and face recognition in hotels, removing the need for them to maintain a list of guest keys or provide replacements should they be lost. In fact, some hotels are already using fingerprint scanners at the front desk to allow guests to unlock their rooms with a finger scan, removing one of the most tedious tasks of hotel check-in.
Preference tracking, user behavior observation and other innovative technologies can add more value to your hospitality business with minimal setup costs. This is because they can easily integrate with your existing systems, so there is no need to change the infrastructure or train employees on new procedures. This means you can save on installation costs while delivering better quality customer service to keep your customers coming back.
Secure In-House Amenities
Modern hospitality outfits strive to provide a one-stop-shop experience, giving guests a wide range of services and facilities within their premises. This gives them the challenge of making their offerings as secure and convenient as possible. Biometrics offers a superlative balance between security and convenience and can streamline processes along the customer journey.
For example, a fingerprint-based hotel room access system eliminates the need for keys or cards that could be stolen or misplaced. This enables guests to use their fingerprints to automatically unlock their rooms and gain access to other areas of the hotel, such as the spa or the restaurant. This also makes it easier for guests to pay for additional services, as they won’t need a list of items to check off or cash around.
The same approach can be applied to the hospitality staff, allowing employees to verify and authenticate their identities and access critical systems with just a single touch. This ensures that only the right people have access to important data and information, and eliminates the risk of accidental or malicious disclosure.
Hospitality units can also leverage mobile biometrics for employee authentication and access to internal apps and systems, such as hotel management software, customer relationship management (CRM), and more. For instance, a mobile fingerprint-based system can allow hospitality employees to log in to their systems with just a finger swipe and authenticate their identity even when they’re on the move.
Accurate Billing
The hospitality industry often deals with the challenge of striking a balance between security and comfort. Too many security measures might turn off guests who prefer convenience over safety and a lack of adequate security could lead to theft or other problems that harm the guest experience.
Biometrics is a powerful tool to provide this balance, with fool-proof verification of identity and a strong guarantee that only the authorized person is using an in-house service or facility. Hotels and similar hospitality-based business can leverage facial recognition, fingerprint, or iris scanning for secure access control, payments and other guest services.
For example, hotels can allow their opted-in loyalty program members to use in-room tablet apps and premium on-screen entertainment services simply by verifying their identity with facial or fingerprint recognition at check out or at the front desk kiosk. The same technology can be used to provide a frictionless payment system for additional hotel services like spa treatments or cafe meals.
Biometric screening can also enhance security by enabling businesses to monitor staff activities. This is especially important in areas of the hotel that might be off limits to non-staff members, such as warehouses and technical rooms. It’s possible for employees to gain unwelcome access to these areas and it can be difficult to keep track of who is coming in and out of those rooms.