August 02, 2007

Hotel Kiosk at Starwood down

You hate to see it but there are those instances where, for whatever reason, the kiosks are not functioning. Here is a sample horror story from visitor trying to use check-in kiosks at Sheraton in NY. One of the kiosks had the "out of order" sign hanging on it and the other one was displaying a too-obvious error msg. Either these kiosks are not being monitored or the people monitoring them are not paying attention.

A couple of months ago when I blogged about Microsoft's touch-sensitive computer-table hybrid, I mentioned that it's going to show up in Starwood's hotel properties and that the existing kiosks I've seen in Starwood hotels, such as Sheratons, often don't work.

Well, I made the trek from San Francisco to New York yesterday (I'm here for the annual conference of the American Society of Business Publication Editors), and when I arrived at the Sheraton New York, one of the check-in kiosks had an "out of order" sign . But the other looked to be working...

checkin.jpg
http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/checkin.jpg

...until I tapped the screen to begin, whereupon it displayed one of the most grandiose error messages I've ever seen--real This is Broken stuff...
http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/missingimagefile.jpg

PC World's Techlog Can't Check In With This Kiosk!

Related Links
http://www.starwoodhotels.com/promotions/promo_landing.html?category=SI_KIOSK_JUN05
http://www.gokis.net/self-service/archives/000951.html

Posted by staff at August 2, 2007 09:01 AM