Citizen M Checking Out RFID to Automate, Personalize Customer Service

The reader will transmit a message to the room's main controller—a PC built into one wall—which will immediately set the room's lighting to the guest's desired brightness and hue (using filters to cast colored light), and also queue the audio and visual devices in the room to match the guest's profile. "For a guest from the United States, for example, all of the U.S.-based channels that the hotel receives will appear first," Boon explains.

The temperature and audio-visual components inside each room—the lighting, thermostat, music player and television—will all be assigned IP addresses so that the guest can control them wirelessly, via Wi-Fi, either through the room's central controller or with a large Wi-Fi-enabled handheld controller that Citizen M has dubbed a "moodpad." The telephone in each room will employ voice-over IP technology, as well.

In addition to adjusting the room's temperature, sounds and lighting, guests will also use the moodpad to schedule a wake-up service—but these won't be your run-of-the-mill wakeup calls, and they won't necessarily involve a telephone. "You might choose to have soft lights and chiming noises wake you up, or you could set the TV to turn on and yell at you like a drill sergeant," jokes Boon.

What's more, housekeeping staff will be able to use RFID cards to enter the guest rooms as well. When a room's RFID interrogator reads a housekeeper's card ID, the controller will send a message to the main hotel-management software that the room is being cleaned, enabling hotel management to keep tabs on status and turn-around time.

Guests checking out will return to the lobby kiosks and present their RFID cards to the reader, and the software will guide them through the checkout process. They will then be able to keep the cards to use at subsequent visits to the same or different Citizen M locations.

Philips expects to be able to apply this concept (of building out structures using prefabricated rooms with built-in Wi-Fi-based controlling infrastructures) not just for hotels but also for general office buildings, hospitals or nursing homes. The company calls the system One Star Is Born, and claims it will save hotels or other building managers money through operational efficiency, since they will be able to maintain building systems centrally, and from a remote location.