Do those hotel kiosks really work?
Henry Harteveldt, vice president of travel research at Forrester Research, could not get the kiosk at the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers to work.
“You mean our dust collectors?” an employee asked when he complained. “It never works.”
Mr Harteveldt’s encounter with the kiosk was a story in The New York Times, where he explained that up to one in ten hotel kiosk transactions fail.
Reasons: they are often incapable of making contact with the hotel’s reservation system, or they may generate a key to the wrong room.
Hotels tried to introduce kiosks in the mid 1980s, but guests were not then interested. A second effort in the early 1990s also was not a huge success.
Today’s proliferating kiosks cost about $15,000 each.
The Sheraton, Hilton and the Marriott chain have all been bullish on expanding kiosks.
“Experienced business travelers often avoid the machines because their performance is so unpredictable,” wrote the Times.
Report by David Wilkening
David
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