In our previous article we have listed some of the areas of a hotel where smart technology can help you reduce the dependence on manual labor, and administration hurdles.
In today’s blog post, we would like to give you a sneak peek to one of the developments of SabeeApp, which is going to bring our vision of a fully automated check-in experience much closer.
The good news is that thanks to a recent legislation change in the Hungarian VIZA requirements, we are allowed to digitize the check-in process in Hungary as well.
The development is going to be available for every GuestAdvisor Tool user, so you get the same benefits all over the world.
According to the new legislation change, guests will have the option to read their personal data from their documents remotely, by scanning their documents themselves, and fulfilling the VIZA data registration requirement.
This enables us to release an update for our GuestAdvisor Tool, as early as 2022 January. This way your future clients will be able to scan their documents and credit cards remotely, so they have a more seamless experience when using the app.
Along with the new release of our GuestAdvisor Tool, we are launching a brand new Front Office App. This new application will be dedicated to your reception team, so they will have the same easy-to-use and hassle-free method when checking in a guest. This also means no more manually typing in data, no more human error.
Thanks to our recent new partnership with Regula, we are going to use their OCR (Optical Character Recognition) MRZ (Machine Readable Zone) and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technologies. This will allow our app to read any type of ID, passport or driving license in the world, and directly load the results into the GuestAdvisor App, so the client can add it to their booking. The same technology will be available in the Front Office App as well, only in this case the data is loaded directly into the reservation, when processing the check-in.
Nowadays online security is a rising concern, and we are giving it extra importance. All the data processing is going to be made on the device, in real time. This means that our software is not going to take any photo from the document and not going to store any sensitive information. Once the required data is read and processed (by the guest’s device), it’s going to be sent to our secure servers, the same way it is done already.
For the clients, this new way of processing their online check-in, will ensure a much more sleek, easy, and fast way to introduce their check-in information. Instead of them having to manually type in their personal data, they will only need to click a button, hold their phone over the document’s both sides, and everything else is going to be done by our program. All processed safe and secure, on their device.
The same holds true for the soon to be available Front Office App. Your reception will have their own dedicated program, for scanning the travel documents. Other than a smartphone, no dedicated device will be needed. Data will be scanned directly into your PMS, so you can forget about expensive 3rd party devices, and synchronization with other services.
It will also give you the hotelier the possibility to register the client’s VIZA requirement before they arrive.
We would like to emphasize that even if your hotel does not have to fulfill any sort of controlled data reading requirement, you will still benefit a lot from this new development. You will not need to manually enter any client data anymore during the check-in, saving your staff valuable time.
We are working on fully automating the checking experience. Our GuestAdvisor Tool is already integrated with Assa Abloy and we are working on the possibility to eliminate the personal authentication process. This means that the clients – unless they want to – do not even need to come to your reception to check-in, bringing us one step closer to the automated hotel future we have envisioned.