Facial recognition technology will soon help usher in an era of seamless hotel check-ins. FlyZoo, Alibaba’s ultramodern boutique hotel in China, is one of the forerunners of this technology.
Traditionally, it takes a minimum of three minutes to check-in, and this number can go up during peak times. The check-in process with facial recognition technology can be completed in less than a minute. The busy modern-day traveler prefers efficiency, and surveys show that over 60% of Chinese travelers have shown a preference for facial recognition technology.
A deeper dive into the technology
Guests will book through an app. They can choose a room on a particular floor and opt for a particular view. Check-in is a breeze through the app, which has facial recognition built into it for Chinese guests. Foreign guests will have to use the kiosks in the lobby to check-in.
Once the initial check-in is done, guests just have to get into the elevators and go to their rooms. They don’t even need a key! The elevator scans a guest’s face and takes him or her to their floor. The door for the room also scans the guest's face to give him or her entry inside.
Once inside, Alibaba’s Alexa-like assistant, Ask Genie, will take in requests for water, extra pillows, new towels, adjusting room temperatures, etc. All goods ordered or requested for will be delivered by a three-foot-tall robot.
Guests can even order food via the app, and that, too, will be delivered by robots. Travelers can also head to the hotel restaurant where food is served and be helped by robots as well. Face-scanning technology will also help guests pay and charge to their hotel rooms if they have forgotten their wallets.
The impressive array of technologies that have made this new-age hotel possible have come from various Alibaba subsidiaries: travel service platform Fliggy, which offered the base for user experience design; Tmall Marketplace for marketing; and Damo Academy for data analytics labs, artificial intelligence, and robotics.
Alibaba already made headlines when Fliggy teamed up Marriott International last year to test run a facial recognition check-in program for Marriott hotels in Sanya and Hangzhou.
Again, the pilot project was just for Chinese guests, but it did give us a glimpse of the future with digital assistant-powered smart hotel rooms and faster check-ins to provide guests with tailored experiences.
It seems like most people have no problems with giving up a little privacy for more convenience and speed. Marriott International has an impressive track record of embracing cutting-edge technology to create memorable experiences for guests all over the world. Plans for a possible global rollout for facial recognition are in the works, a move that is set to position the Marriott brand as a global hospitality leader for this futuristic capability.
