Hilton Hotels last month announced that 37 of its properties have been equipped with lobby kiosks that allow guests to check in for flights, change or upgrade seats, and print boarding passes for 18 airlines.
The ability to manually print out boarding passes is an upgrade to existing features of the kiosks, which already allow guests to view hotel reservations, get room keys, check in and out and view their hotel folio data. Hilton said that implementation of the new capabilities at other properties would be done on a case-by-case basis.
InterContinental Hotels Group last year outfitted kiosks at the Holiday Inn Gwinnett Center in Duluth, Ga., with the ability to print out airline boarding passes, which it has been testing as part of its "next-generation property design"
(BTN, April 18, 2005). IHG expects to supply the entire Holiday Inn system with the new technology by year-end. Marriott International currently has similar functionality at its Detroit Marriott Renaissance Center property and expects to expand it to three more hotels in the upcoming weeks. Starwood Hotels & Resorts said that it currently does not have enough airline partners to offer such a tool.
Although the kiosks are now equipped to offer increased services, Erin Barth, vice president of global travel management for JPMorgan Chase, said that although having the ability to print out boarding passes at the hotels is helpful, it probably won't be something that spurs customers to select one property over another. "People pretty much check in at the airport, but to have your boarding pass already from the hotel just expedites the process even more," said Barth. "But most travelers have what they need—this is more of just a value add that saves them a little more time, but I don't think it'll be a differentiator for a hotel on whether someone stays there or not."