Spotlight

A safe choice

Hotels are constantly upgrading their services to make their guests feel at home and secure. Preeti Kannan gives an insight into the future of room safes

Your hotel might be extremely technology driven with cutting-edge technology from Wi-fi to plasma TVs and soon probably a 3D TV, all just to make your guest feel extremely comfortable. But have you ever wondered, how secure is your guest room safe, especially with travellers lugging around expensive laptops, digital diaries, digital cameras and palm tops, which they want protected from theft?

From lockers to fingerprints

The use of a safe in hotels is a relatively new concept in India. About eight years back, hotels used a locker system similar to banks and they were installed in the reception area. People deposited their valuables here and collected them when they checked out of the hotel. Guests were never comfortable as it was in the common area and was a mechanical locker, where keys could be easily duplicated and difficult to track.

Next came the in-room mechanical safes with key access, which guests could use with greater ease. The basic electronic safe is a keypad safe, operated by a numeric code. Then came safes that could be activated by the magnetic strip (magstrip) card used as a room key. The same key could be used to open the room safe. All the guest would have to do is insert the key into the safe and set the code to open it.

Earlier hotels used a resident master key, which was a pre-programmed nine-digit code. Vivek Prem, area sales manager, India, Onity United Technologies Corporation, avers "With many people in the hotel learning the code, it became a little risky and slowly obsolete. We then developed an equipment called the Extended Portable Programmer (XPP) or Control Emergency Unit (CEU), which is like a palm top device. It can help the hotel to program the safe depending on the room number." In case the guest forgot the code, the XPP or the CEU electronically overwrote the code and helped open the safe, he points out.

The innovation over the room-cum-safe magstrip is the use of a guest's credit card instead of the room key. The hotel industry has gone through a transition in the last five years, where mechanical safes have been almost phased out. Even those with both mechanical and electronic have moved to just digital electronic safes, as it is possible to duplicate keys.

In fact, Vingcard Elsafe of Assay Abloy, one of the leading safe manufacturers in the country, says that most hoteliers prefer the basic model of a numeric code. The reason, according to them, is that there are chances of guests losing the swipe cards and this puts hotels in a fix.

However, the future inclines towards biometric safes where fingerprints are used to open guest room doors and to access a safe. It is not so popular in India because of the huge costs involved. A biometric safe costs close to about US $400 in comparison to a normal safe that costs about US $150.

Innovative technology

With increased foreign travel into India, hotels say that Europeans prefer to reserve guest rooms which have safes. Shafee Ahmed, director of sales and marketing, Rain Tree Hotel, says, "Safes are mostly used by European travellers. They specify on safe deposit rooms while making reservations and are more comfortable with a hotel that can cater to their security needs."

The biometric safe might well be the rule rather than an exception in Indian hotels like their international counterparts. Though the discomfort in giving out fingerprints and exorbitant costs might act as a deterrent initially, biometric safes may slowly render the digital ones redundant, similar to what credit cards did to physical currency. When hotels and guests warm up to this concept, a biometric safe might definitely be more affordable, making it a more popular and prudent choice.