Hotel Checkin Via Kiosk

<H1>Hotel Checkin Via Kiosk</H1><H3>By Cheryl Rosen</H3>Garden City, N.Y. - Travelers annoyed at getting bumped from hotels where they hold reservations may soon have a technological alternative: They can check in-and get a room key in their hand-before even leaving their home city.

The new Travel Wiz Kiosk from Avis Inc.'s technology subsidiary, WizCom International, promises to allow travelers to make an automated booking, check their airline departure time and gate information, and rent a car and print out point-to-point directions-simply by swiping a credit card through a machine in their hotel lobby or airport lounge.

Avis spokesman D.J. Vallauri said that the kiosks, now in prototype form, will go on sale to travel suppliers in June, and should begin to turn up in hotels and airline lounges by September.

Eventually, Vallauri said, WizCom hopes to make the kiosk's capabilities available to hotel guests on the televisions in their rooms. "The kiosks will be a good tool in the hotel lobby, but the technology will become a great tool when it moves up to the guest room," he said.

Vallauri declined to cite projected prices or sales figures for the product, but said, "the bottom line is that the price has got to be cost-effective for the hotels to buy them."

Meanwhile, kiosk competitor Jeff Hoffman, chairman and CEO of Virtual Shopping Inc., cheered the development of kiosk-based travel technology and welcomed WizCom to the field.

"We like the idea of having WizCom join us in this market because their product will help get people used to the electronic medium," Hoffman said. "Those are excellent applications that streamline the whole process-as long as the kiosks are reliable. If I swipe my credit card and get my key and go straight to my room, I'm going to like that a lot. But if I have problems and wind up on line at the hotel front desk anyway, I'm going to say that the technology just wastes my time."

Hoffman noted that Virtual Shopping's kiosks offer live two-way video links that allow the user "to talk face-to-face with somebody on an embedded video camera" if they need to do so.