Last year the Starwood Hotels group announced that they would be allowing smartphones to unlock their hotel doors through the use of Bluetooth proximity keys. However if you’d rather not be fishing for your phone with your hands full, you might be interested to learn that your Apple Watch will also be able to unlock the hotel room doors at Starwood Hotels.
That being said, this is only applicable to those who are members of the group’s SPG rewards program. The new application will allow guests to check in to the hotel and basically walk into the hotel, head right up to their room and unlock it and start unpacking. This is compared to the more “traditional” process where one has to check in at the reception and wait to receive their key. This could be ideal for the business traveller who just wants to skip the process and get into bed ASAP.
According to the group, “After registering for SPG Keyless, the Apple Watch will automatically send guests their room number and will function as their hotel room key at any SPG Keyless enabled Starwood hotel allowing guests to bypass the front desk (where available).” Not all of the group’s hotels will support the feature right off the bat, but the company is hoping to roll out the feature to over 30,000 of its hotel rooms soon.
If anything this goes to show some of the potential uses of smartwatches which could replace some of the features that was previously only available on smartphones.
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