We Call It CRM; Do Guests Call It Creepy?

A story out of the UK this week crystallizes an uneasy question pondered by many tech-savvy hoteliers: How much information is too much?

At hand is a controversy over the use of the Internet to dig up information on guests in advance of their stays, and to keep files about the interests, habits and preferences of those guests so they may be better served upon return trips. Some wonder whether the practice is a violation of the UK’s Data Protection Act, which governs the collection of personal data by companies.

In the hotel industry, we call this customer relationship management; judging by the outcry over the Times of London’s expose, the public apparently sees it as an invasion of privacy. So while hoteliers generally think of CRM as smart business—and they’re right—are we as an industry heading down the wrong path here? Take this quote from Peter Carey, editor of Privacy and Data Protection magazine: "If you asked a hotel-goer whether they were happy with a file being kept, many might say: ‘You’ve got to be kidding, I wouldn’t want that.’" Now, maybe a lot of those folks would have less of a problem with it if they understood just what is being done with that information. But Carey’s probably not wrong in that many guests would opt out of CRM if they could.

Now, it’s not as if hoteliers aren’t conscious of the Orwellian implications of advanced hotel technology. We now have guestrooms that log a person’s favorite TV channels and ideal temperatures. We have concierge software that remembers a guest’s daughter’s birthday. We have hotel Web sites that record a guest’s click history and predict what kinds of marketing offers they might be interested in. We have encoded keycards that tell hallway signage what conference the guest is attending and, hey, would they like to reserve a tee time after the meeting? With biometrics, we even store guests’ iris scans. And then there is the 180 million-person database of Acxiom’s ConnectionPoint-X, which makes Google searches look downright quaint.

So, hoteliers, I ask you: Where is the line on guest privacy? Have we crossed it? And even if we haven’t, are you confident that your guests would not object if they knew what kind of information is being kept on them?