Hotel Check-In Kiosks: Broken!
I apologize in advance if you find this boring, but as someone who spends a lot of time on the road, I'm both frustrated and fascinated by the fact that automated hotel check-in kiosks--presumably designed to make it easier to get a room--rarely give me anything but heartache. (I blogged about problems with one in New York here, and woes in Las Vegas here.)
Last night, I arrived in New York and took a cab to the Sheraton Manhattan, where I arrived at 11pm. There are two kiosks in the lobby. One had a blank screen; the other had a welcoming message.
"This probably isn't going to work," I thought to myself.
I touched the screen on the one that appeared to be working. It flashed, and gave me an apology and a request that I talk to a real person.
Here, incidentally, is a New York Times story from almost three years ago about glitches with hotel kiosks, including the ones at the Sheraton New York that have personally bedeviled me. As far as I can tell, the situation has gotten no better since the Times published its story.
Which leaves me wondering three things:
1) Just how hard is it to build a check-in kiosk that can actually check me in?
2) Why do Sheraton and other hoteliers continue to waste their patrons' time with kiosks that misbehave. (That's assuming that my run of bad luck is at least kind of typical.)
3) Just how long is it going to take until they get these things right--or give up?
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Solution: Stay at a Four Seasons next time :) No mucking around with inane technology. :D
Four Seasons sounds great--but I'm not sure if PC World's accounting department would agree...
--Harry
I have HD DVD and it is great. I will continue to rent from Netflix until the HD DVD run dry. I will buy Bewulf later this mounth. Now we will see if Blu-Ray sets the world on fire with the $400 beta players. Two of my friends just saw HD DVD yesterday and they were amazed. I told them the whole sad story about the format war. They asked "What's Blu-Ray?". It's a "Hi-Def DVD" format I told them. Two out of three people still don't know anything about Blu-Ray. I may buy Blu-Ray 2.0 in two years when the price is right and these early beta players fade away if Blu-Ray can actually replace DVD. Or maybe I will just stick with HD On Demand instead and skip disks entirely.