mobile computing heaven

The race is on.

The Westin St. Francis in San Francisco’s Union Square is among the first hoteliers to sign up with LodgeNet Interactive Corporation to implement its Mobile Internet Devices and integrate them into their own hospitality system.

In English, this means Westin guests can order in-room dining, book a spa appointment, make golf reservations, sign up for their reward program points and even change the in-room temperature and electricity controls through their iPhones and Blackberries. Basically, guests’ smart phones replace the concierge function, which will no doubt trigger a rebuttal from the National Concierge Association. But let’s face it: the name of the game has always been “be relevant or be run over.”

The project is in the pilot stages this summer; LodgeNet says it should roll out more test markets between now and the end of 2009. Anyone who wants to see this technology in action can stop by the company’s booth at HITEC at the Anaheim Convention Center June 23 – 25.

It’s a smart move for anyone who read the American Hotel and Lodging Association’s 2008 study on customer satisfaction. A whopping 82 percent of guests say they care most about their wi-fi services, even over in-room entertainment systems and airline check-in kiosks.

Which could explain why Omni Hotels — the first luxury hotel brand to give guests free wireless access in their rooms — is focusing more on the basics. It signed with BelAir Networks to upgrade its network design to accommodate mobile computing. “With nearly 50 percent of our guests using wi-fi and their bandwidth demands continuing to accelerate, we sought a high-performance network partner” says Richard Tudgay, Omni’s IT veep.

Photography: Westin St. Francis

With the launch of City Tours (http://citytours.googlelabs.com/), Google adds to the list of trip-planning solutions which use some combination of local data, maps, user generated content and social networking tools.

Google City Tours

City Tours is still under Google Labs , and as such, it’s still pretty much in it’s infancy, but it’s already being touted as something with immense possibilities. City Tours points out the attractions and plans out multi-day trips. All you do is name the city and you’re good to go. And if you specify the location of your hotel and the length of your trip, City Tours will map out a complete itinerary for you.

When you type in the city name, you get back a planned 3-day trip, with around 10-12 attractions mapped out per day. The site suggests time to be spent at each location, and walking distances between the mapped attractions. You can modify the number of days, and add new attractions.

It’s pretty basic and simple, and adding new attractions seems to work, so long as you don’t try to add some name or attraction which could have other meanings. But the interesting part is in the possibilities that City Tours offers. It uses Google Maps to figure out the relative positions of the attractions in each itinerary, and line them up so as to create a suggested tour with the minimum overall amount of walking necessary.

So you could, for example, work out a complete trip plan, starting from your hotel, throw in restaurants, attractions, shows, and a complete trip, rather than just the attractions. You could make it work for a multi-day roadtrip across state lines, involving multiple destinations.

And instead of just walking between destinations, if you could plug-in Google Transit to cover the distances between the attractions, that would make it even more closer to reality. You’d get a trip plan with suggested attractions for each day of your stay, and the closest public transport options for traveling from one point to the next. That’s pretty much all you’re looking for in a trip planner.

And there are plenty of sites, like GoPlanit, which already offer something close to this. The difference with Google is the vast scale of it and the user participation - pretty soon, people will have added so many attractions to each place that the system will be bigger and better than what any other trip planning site can offer.

FlyClear, a New York based company which charged annual fees for clear card services to help it’s members get through TSA Airport Security checkpoints faster, ceased operations earlier this week.

Clear Card from FlyClear

Apparently, Clear’s parent company – Verified Identity Pass Inc., was “unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to continue operations.” The Clear Lanes being operated at 20 airports nationwide, and being used by the over 260,000 people who had signed on with FlyClear, suddenly closed on Monday without any prior intimation.

The service had an annual price tag of $199, and the company says it’s not in a position to offer any refund. And it looks like the company is closed for good, with no plans for any comeback. They haven’t filed for bankruptcy protection, and they’ve wiped all the data from the airport verification kiosks.

FlyClear was founded in 2003 by entrepreuner Steven Brill, and the program took off at Orlando International Airport in 2005. The Clear Lanes at Orlando alone have seen over 1 million passengers pass through. For frequent and elite travelers stressed out by the post-9/11 security measures and extra-long lines at Airport Security checkpoints, Clear provided a much-needed service – A Clear Card with a biometric chip issued after a TSA vetting which whisked you past the bottlenecked checkpoints.

Inspite of the obvious need for such a service – and this is probably one of the main reason for Clear’s demise – fact is that neither the TSA nor the airlines ever fully embraced it, and they weren’t really able to expand the service and make it a commonly available facility at all airports.

And last year in May, a laptop containing information about 33k Clear users and applicants went missing from the Clear office at San Francisco International Airport. The TSA went ballistic and revoked Clear’s Registered Traveler status. 10 days later, the laptop mysteriously turns up in the same spot where it went missing, and prettty soon, things were back to normal.

So what happens to all the data now - The fingerprints, iris images, photos, names, addresses, credit card numbers and other personal information? Clear is promising that all personal data on record will be deleted and members notified in a final email missive from the company.

But they haven’t deleted it all yet, and a statement on their website states that the information provided can only be used by companies for the TSA’s Registered Traveler program. So they could keep it on file until they’re able to ‘sell’ the information in accordance with these rules.

And now, with all their assets will be up for grabs and likely to be put on sale, it only makes it harder for the company to make good on it’s promise to keep the data secure.

Either way, Clear is gone, and there’s no fast lane for a quarter of a million people who forked out $199 a year.

You could be in your desired hotel room for less by using a few hacks.

Although hotels use “opaque sites” like Priceline and Hotwire to unload unsold inventory without diluting their brand names, with a little sleuthing customers can often figure out what hotel they’re booking. But as I recently found out, sleuths like me should beware, because if you play the game long enough, once in awhile you’re going to end up in the “wrong” property.

For my blog Frugalista, on Chicago Tribune partner site ChicagoNow, I summed up the techniques I use to figure out what no-name hotels are being offered on Priceline or Hotwire. These techniques are for using when you hope to stay at a specific property but don’t want to pay the publicly available rate:

1) Check the site you’re shopping on and other booking sites to find out how many stars your desired property is listed at. Note whether there are other properties with the same number of stars listed in the city or neighborhood.

2) Check whether the site you’re shopping on offers your desired hotel as a named property. I don’t know if this is a hard and fast rule, but I’ve noticed that if Priceline is offering a property upfront, you’re likely to find the very same place on the “name your own price” section.

3) Check a forum such as BetterBidding or BidonTravel to find out what hotels others have gotten recently by bidding in the same area you’re looking in. Usually you will notice that in a certain star category, everyone has gotten the same property. If this ISN’T the property you want, don’t bid because this is the property you’re likely to end up in!

4) If others are indeed getting your desired property, go ahead and figure out what to bid. This is something you can also learn from BetterBidding; people post the amounts of their winning and losing bids, often revealing the lowest possible price that will “win” the room. If you’re not sure what the lowest possible price is, and you have enough time, bid lower than the lowest price you see others have paid and try bidding again when allowed 24 hours later.

5) If you don’t get winning bid information from other travelers, just try bidding 50-75% less than published rates. BidonTravel’s tip sheet suggests checking rates for the same day of the week you’ll be traveling on.

In the past, I have used these techniques to get into the same hotel as other family members for a wedding and to get in the preferred spot for an urban getaway.

However, the techniques are NOT foolproof. Take this weekend, when my family is heading to a wedding near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I did my research, and felt pretty sure that the Hilton Garden, where the family was staying, was the only 2-1/2 star hotel in Oconomowoc, a small town west of the city. I went on Priceline and bid for 2-1/2 stars, only to be informed after bidding that I had been “upgraded” to a 3-star property across the freeway.

Oh well — maybe after a weekend of wedding activities, we’ll have had enough family togetherness by the time we hit the hotel anyway. And at least I paid less than half of what I would have paid through my desired hotel’s Web site or on the phone.

There was a warning that my scheme was not going to work out: Priceline had marked the 3-star category as the “best value” before I entered my bid. If you’re bidding and see such a mark on a higher star category, I would expect to be upgraded to the category Priceline is pushing, whether you like it or not.

Photo by Oakbrookterracehotels, used via Creative Commons license.