Hotel-booking powerhouses Priceline and Expedia have nothing to worry about yet.
In a research environment, BMW has created a high-tech method for booking a hotel room from the car and enabling guests to proceed right to their rooms, where they can unlock the doors with their car keys using near-field communications.
Talk about auto-matic booking systems.
Officials say although the system was tested as a prototype, and it should be going live fairly soon.
But, this isn’t a solution which ready for the masses of drivers who don’t own BMWs anytime soon.
Leveraging an existing partnership with Google, BMW has teamed with Micros property management systems and VingCard Elsafe to enable BMW drivers to use their vehicles’ GPS and Internet search features to book and pay for room reservations from the car and then to bypass the hotel front desk and open their guest rooms using their NFC-equipped car keys.
Here’s basically how it works:
Before the driver can use the booking services, he or she must enter credit card details into the system one time.
BMW ConnectedDrive, which includes a plethora of information and communications apps, detects the car’s location and uses Google Local Search to display nearby hotels. Google’s suggest feature streamlines the search process [and hopefully makes it less distracting], according to Google.
Drivers can use Google Panoramio to view images of the destination and Google Street View to access a more detailed look.
Yes, hopefully they are doing this while the vehicle is parked somewhere.
The system connects to the hotel reservation system via PMS-provider Micros and an application enables guests to book and pay for the room from the car. Drivers have to confirm their identity to BMW ConnectedDrive by entering a personal identification number. Officials say BMW-backed encryption ensures the security of user and payment data.
A credit card clearing company handles the invoicing and the hotel gets notified that the reservation is guaranteed by credit card.
BMW ConnectedDrive then gets a notification of the hotel room assignment from Micros’ OPERA PMS, which uses OPERA Web services.
Drivers can press a button to transfer the hotel information to their navigation system and this puts them on course to drive to the hotel.
The BMW car key is equipped with NFC and it receives an access code for the guest room.
Upon arrival at the hotel, guests can bypass the front desk and use their BMW keys to open their rooms’ doors, outfitted with VingCard Elsafe locks, which are NFC-enabled.
And, there is a merchandising angle for hotels involved with this seemingly futuristic hotel-booking system.
If drivers/guests opt-in to let BMW share the data with hotels, then they would receive targeted promotions of special offers, officials say.
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Let me guess… BMW will patent this and 2 years from now they will be suing all the car rental companies that try a similar application
Gelardi, is that you? What are you doing reading about BMWs?
Isn’t that what every company does? Why shouldn’t BMW do it?
We do not care what BMW will do with patents. We see this as a great opportunity for hotels to interact and sell direcly to hotel guests. MICROS is THE solutions and service provider for the global hotel industry and by reaching out with partners like BMW we will bring value to our customers. Simple story. Vorsprung durch Technik… sorry this is Audi….
see..I told you car travel would be disruptive
…maybe RoomKey should quickly rebrand as CarKey
An NFC equipped phone could do all of this (except the actual dangerous-driving part) while weighing 1600Kg less and costing maybe $200,000 less.
If the driving part of this story is what makes it so exciting, I could tape the phone to the windscreen of my 1972 Karmann and come up a good $180,000 better off. Hell, for that matter, I could stick the phone on my bicycle and this whole “innovation” could have an enviro bent to it too.
I am not sure if you got the story. A 1972 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia is a wonderful historic car, so are index card and key racks managed by friendly hotel front desk clerks. The story here is slightly different. It is about the complete real-time, online interaction between all parties involved. The NFC phone at your windscreen has probably no easy to use multi function buttom where you could turn the wheel and get a booking done with 2 clicks, all visible at a larger screen than that of your own mobile device, establish live interaction with the real hotel inventory (no allotment, no reseller in between), out of your car live interaction with the hotel room key system and get the check-in and door opening credentials read onto your NFC device (or highly secured BMW car key) only seconds after the booking was made. Not to forget automatic check-in and online payment….
I get the story entirely.
All the features you mention: real-time online interaction, NFC, live interaction with real hotel inventory, live interaction with a hotel room key system and NFC door-opening credentials can all be achieved without a $200,000 automobile. All of that is software and business-agreement related: nothing to do with the mechanics of a car.
And voice-control and text-to-speech on phones makes this no harder than “2 clicks on a multi-function wheel”. The screen size of a phone is largely irrelevant to the discussion when even the main article mentions that the hotel selection process probably shouldn’t be done while actually driving.
From a marketing perspective, the vast majority of people don’t drive BMW, so audience is severely limited. Many hotel stays are not arrived at by the guest’s car (any travel involving a flight), so having the door code in your car keys is unhelpful. Even if a guest DOES arrive at the hotel in their BMW, it is far more likely that they’ll spend their days with their phone in their pocket than their car keys. And… I bet every BMW driver has a smartphone.
As Boro mentions below, the technology is exciting. I agree. It’s exciting in a BMW… but kind of like how those internet-connected fridges were exciting.
Of course NFC equipped phones will do this as well… That’s exciting about the future where guests of hotels with advanced management systems will be able to open their rooms with NFC equipped devices. As far as “taping the phone to the windscreen..”, you could do that for making phone calls as well… However, you would probably prefer just say to your car “Call ….!”
Wow… I guess this has to be the next development for our hotel software!
Calling BMW.