RFID May Render Keycards Obsolete

By Adam Kirby, Associate Editor -- Hotels, 4/1/2007

The magnetic keycard, the reigning industry standard for door lock mechanism, may receive some competition. Radio-frequency identification technologies, commonly known as RFID, are poised to claim a portion of the hotel lock market. About a dozen mobile phone manufacturers are about to launch cell phones with near field communication (NFC) capability, which can communicate with RFID chips within a range of a few feet. Once widely adopted- by 2010, about half of all cell phones are expected to have the technology-NFC and RFID could revolutionize the hotel check-in process.

Guests of the not-so-distant future will check in online and, before they even walk into the hotel, will have a signal remotely sent to their phones that can unlock their guestroom. Once at their room, having bypassed the front desk entirely, the guests can simply present their phones to the locking mechanism, and they're inside. A variation of that model, using credit cards rather than phones, already is being developed in Japan. Itochu Corp. and credit card company Orico are planning to launch a hotel brand that would have few or no front desk staff-guests would simply book online and then use their RFID-equipped credit cards to access their rooms.

Dallas-based VingCard Elsafe is currently beta-testing the RFID phone-key concept, which was named Best Innovation of the Year at November's Equip'Hotel tradeshow in Paris. The majority of guestroom locks will be RFID-based before long, with cell phones being one of the primary forms, predicts VingCard President Marc Freundlich. "It's just plain more convenient," Freundlich says. "It's an easier user interface for the customer to present their card, or their telephone if it's so enabled, to a lock on a room."

Where RFID is being used most prominently in hotels currently, though, is in the point-of-sale arena. Hotels heavy on entertainment and F&B offerings, particularly those catering to families, are finding RFID an ideal answer to the demand for cashless transactions of all sorts.

San Francisco-based Precision Dymanics Corp. has outfitted about a dozen North American waterpark hotels with RFID readers at concession stands, video arcades and other spots where kids might be inclined to make impulse buys. Waterproof wristbands charge purchases to guest accounts, negating the need to carry cash or credit cards, and the wristbands can be used to unlock guestrooms as well. At about US$25,000 per reader, RFID is not an insignificant cost, but it is hardly daunting, says Robin Barber, marketing vice president for Precision Dynamics. The RFID transmitters themselves typically cost about US$1 each.