As device makers start making home appliances and gadgets more hi-tech and connected, it isn’t surprising to see those changes applied to hotels as well. For example some hotels allow its guests to check into their rooms using an app on their phones, and also unlocking their rooms using their phones.
There are also some hotels that include tablets that can control certain aspects of the room, and this is something that Hilton is hoping to make standard across its hotels, so much so that the hotel group has announced that they will begin rolling out its Connected Room across its hotels in the US in 2018.
According to Hilton’s announcement, “Guests who stay at Connected Room-enabled properties will soon be able to use the Hilton Honors app to manage most things they would traditionally do manually in a room, from controlling the temperature and lighting to the TV and window coverings. Guests will also be able to personalize their room with technology that loads the most popular streaming media and other accounts to in-room TVs.”
While this is an interesting idea and a convenient one, especially when you think about how ubiquitous smartphones are, there are some security concerns. Earlier this year a hack saw hackers shut down a hotel’s key card system, preventing new cards from being generated, thus preventing new guests from checking in, but hopefully these are security issues that Hilton has considered for its Connected Room.