Technology is always advancing and stream lining all sorts of tasks, whether it be buying stuff online or paying for an item without taking your credit card out of your wallet out at a store, just anything really. Well now it is potentially taking jobs away from hotel front desk employees (or making it easier for them).
Aloft Hotel Manhattan and Silicon Valley guests will soon be able to walk past the check-in and proceed to enter their room without any human interaction because they can use their smartphone as a room key. The person staying in the hotel will do everything you would do at the front desk from home, in the car, on the airplane, or wherever you might be.
Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide is the company that is planning on pushing out this service to the two hotels, the one in a Harlem neighborhood and in Cupertino, California. The hotel stayer will receive a message on the app Starwood has created which has the "room key", and the user taps or twists the phone to unlock the door via Bluetooth. Starwood says that it is currently working for iPhone 4s or newer and Android phones 4.3 or higher.
This is a pretty sweet feature that can lead to some great future gadget ideas, but the question is "is it safe?". Technology hackers are nothing new and the world is getting more reliant on technology. Now were not saying that Starwood's technology isn't safe, but trying to point out some precautions, and only time will tell us if this futuristic idea is going to be good or bad.
The idea of having a key that is being activated via Bluetooth seems like it could be easily hacked. There are various apps available on the Google Play store that allow you to hack Bluetooth. Yes some of these apps seem not to work or the function of the "hack" is pretty low, but what if a real hacker gets the idea to hack Starwood's app. If your hotel key was hacked, there goes all your belongings that you brought to your room, and no evidence of a break in.
How could a hacker possible hack my phone you might say? Well did you know they could hack your car?
There is hacking going on everyday and companies have their teams trying to counter them, but no matter what there always seems to be some kind of loophole.
We still won't know how viable a Bluetooth room key will be for a while, but all I know is I do not want to be the guinea pig for that. Maybe Starwood can up the security of the system and add some biometrics into the mix with a combo of eye scan, and Bluetooth key, I really don't know how this will play out, and maybe we will be writing a success of the Bluetooth hotel key, or a fail in the future. Let us know what you think about this technology. Do you think it's a good idea? Would you feel safe? Leave a comment below.
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