If Your Phone is Charged, You Can Open Your Hotel Door

I read a story in the International Herald Tribune at the airport that described a smart idea…using cellphones to unlock doors at hotels and vacation rentals. With the amount of time people spend looking at their phones, it seems to make a lot of sense.

In Stockholm the Clarion Hotel tested a program to open room doors using a key that arrives in a text message. There’s a lot of savings here…no more plastic cards and reducing how many people are needed behind the desk to check guests in. The good part is that you can set the ‘keys’ to expire, so it would be useful in hotels as well as for vacation rentals.

The other cool thing is that people can unlock their doors from anywhere on earth they are connected to the web. So you could send someone the key while you’re on the road.The only drawback is a problem faced by any electronic device: what happens if your iPhone is out of juice when you get to the door? One vacation-home rental property owner joked that he might have to leave a charger down the block at the corner deli.