A luxury boutique hotel in Boston (Nine Zero) have introduced iris scanning for access to their penthouse to replace a keycard.
The iris scanners are already in place for the hotel’s employees and vendors and they are planning to extend this to more guest rooms.
Whilst not an extension of the Registered Traveller programme in the US this does offer some interesting possibilities for elite travellers. If you can have a smart card which carries your passport and iris scan details which gets you through customs/immigration faster then perhaps the same card could be used to get into your hotel room. The logical extension of this is to then add the capacity to transact via the smartcard – either with it having a stored value or being used simply as a security layer to replace the credit card signature (or the room chargeback proceedure in hotels).
A concern about this system being used at Nine Zero though is security. Whilst they say they erase iris details after the guest leaves, if iris details are the identification device used for the Registered Traveller programme and if someone has both the guests details (passport number, credit card, DOB etc) which a hotel would, then what is the risk of forging Registered Traveller cards if hotels also have the iris scan details of a guest?
The eyes have it as a hotel key – Hotel Hotsheet – USATODAY.com
