Marriott International is working with joint-venture partner Alibaba Group to pilot the use of facial recognition at check-in with Alibaba's travel services platform, Fliggy. The testing launched this month at two properties in China, the Hangzhou Marriott Hotel Qianjiang and the Sanya Marriott Hotel Dadonghai Bay.
Marriott aims to roll the technology out across all properties. Such an expansion—through the largest hotelier in the world working with one of the three largest online travel agencies in China—would provide the hotel industry a dramatic shove forward in adopting facial recognition.
Up to now, the airline industry has grabbed most of the press around facial recognition, as airports from Sydney to Senai have piloted or deployed it in some form or fashion. This year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has been working with airlines—including Delta, JetBlue and Lufthansa—and airports to test the technology as a way to both enhance security and improve operational efficiencies.
Marriott's hope for facial recognition is similar, to improve operations. According to the company, check-in typically takes three minutes, most of that time spent waiting in line. The process being piloted has a hotel guest approach a self-serve machine, scan his or her ID, take a photo and input contact details. The system verifies the information and dispenses a room key card. That process, Marriott said, shrinks check-in time to less than a minute.
Marriott International is one of a number of hotel companies that already offers digital check-in and mobile room keys through its rewards app. However, in North America at least, the adoption rate of such technology is mixed. According to the J.D. Power 2017 North America Hotel Guest Satisfaction Index Study, only 19 percent of all hotel guests have downloaded a hotel's mobile app, and 38 percent of those don't use it during their stay. Only about 4 percent of check-ins and 1 percent of check-outs occur using the app. InterContinental Hotels Group CEO Keith Barr told BTN in 2017 the company declined to advance a rollout of mobile room keys because it found adoption was low.
That opens the door for facial recognition to step in and improve the check-in process where, so far, apps have failed. But there's also potential for hotels to deploy facial recognition in other ways.
Facial recognition tech companies, including NEC and Axis Communications, have for a number of years marketed VIP identification software to hospitality companies and other business verticals. Such software uses facial recognition via surveillance videos or closed-circuit TV and alerts a property to the arrival of a VIP found within a database.
Though the application of facial recognition in this particular way has not been spoken of publicly by any major hotel companies, such uses could align with the ongoing push of the hotel industry overall toward personalization as a way to improve the guest experience.
In May, Marriott partnered with Salesforce to build a customer recognition platform designed to enhance personalization and improve interactions between guests and Marriott associates. A number of major hotel companies—including IHG, Radisson Hotel Group and Choice Hotels International—are deploying cloud-based global reservations systems designed to create new capabilities around Big Data and personalization.
While facial recognition seems to be joining the long list of travel industry buzzwords, potential roadblocks still lie ahead. On July 13, Microsoft president Brad Smith published a blog post that urged for closer scrutiny and government regulation around facial recognition technology. Smith cited an ongoing issue around bias—facial recognition is often not as effective at correctly identifying ethnic minorities—but said, even if that problem was addressed, the issues relating to facial recognition raise "critical questions about our fundamental freedoms." It may seem odd for a company to urge greater regulation of its products, he said—Microsoft has been a pioneer of facial recognition—but "there are many markets where thoughtful regulation contributes to a healthier dynamic for consumers and producers alike." Smith also called on tech companies, Microsoft included, to be more selective, transparent and ethically minded in how they develop facial recognition technology.