July 30–Hotels are trying to make the check-in and checkout process as easy as possible.
The Starwood hotel chain has expanded the use of technology that lets guests use their smartphones to open their hotel doors, rolling it out to 130 hotels and resorts in 30 countries from the chain's initial 10-hotel foray.
Now, Standard International, the proudly offbeat boutique chain with hotels in Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles, is letting guests schedule when they want to initially arrive and depart.
"Instead of having guests work around the hotel's schedule we want the hotel to work around the guest's schedule," said Amar Lalvani, managing partner of Standard International.
Lalvani concedes that without a uniform check-in and checkout time, housekeepers have a more difficult time scheduling when to clean and prepare hotel rooms for the next guests.
Creating a time frame that works around guests is made easier by computerized schedules, he said. And it helps that the Standard hotel chain has only five small and mid-size hotels, because adopting such an irregular schedule may not work for a massive hotel chain with bigger hotels, Lalvani said.
"The hotel business is very rigid in how it does things," he said.
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