IBM Developers Focus On Smarter Travel Technology

<B> IBM Developers Focus On Smarter Travel Technology</B>

By Cheryl Rosen

Imagine booking your next business trip by simply speaking into your computer, being checked in by your rental car company the instant you grasp the handrail on the airport bus, getting your hotel key from a lobby kiosk that recognizes your face, and sliding a chip card into the hotel TV to access your files at work and to download your hotel folio data.

Though infrequent travelers may mourn the loss of human contact that technology brings, the speed and efficiency of an automated process is the road warrior's vision of heaven. And every piece of the technology to make it possible exists today--if not yet at the checkin counters of the travel industry, then at least in the hallways of developers like the IBM Solutions Center in Hawthorne, N.Y.