From unlocking our phones to recognizing people in a picture, we'e all familiar with face recognition technologies. But, when it comes to business applications, there's still a certain level of uncertainty. However, some companies are already leveraging biometrics to deliver better experiences and reduce costs, and hotels and other hospitality companies are no exception.

The holiday season is here, and hotel staff are more focused than ever on giving their guests a memorable experience. Yet, because of the high level of manual check-in and authentication procedures, many fail to deliver.

A merry season starts with biometric authentication — keep reading to understand why.

What is biometric authentication?

Authentication is a method of verifying that a person is who they say they are. The authentication system compares provided data with validated user information already provided. Biometric authentication does this verification through distinctive biological characteristics.

Biometric authentication includes fingerprint and face scanning, among others. While fingerprint scanning requires specific hardware and customer-hardware interaction, face biometrics allows an easy way to authenticate customers that work with everyday affordable hardware (cameras) that requires no physical contact.

3 ways to streamline service and improve the guest experience with face biometric authentication

Face authentication is about matching security and convenience. For hotels and other hospitality facilities, face authentication creates a low friction authentication experience that benefits both hoteliers and the customer.

1. Deliver quick and convenient check-in experiences

In the hotel industry, staffing is a major challenge, especially during the holiday season. In light of the recent pandemic, many hoteliers are struggling to find qualified workers. With high staff shortages, it seems counterproductive to have employees devoted to low-value tasks, such as the creation of guest records for the PMS. With the help of biometrics, you can automate the check-in process, creating a better experience for your guests and allowing your employees to engage and build deeper relationships with customers.

At the moment of reservation, or before arriving at the hotel, guests can simply take a picture of their ID document and a selfie, proving they are the owners of that document. The ID data is automatically checked and will flow directly to the hotel systems once verified. Once guests arrive, your employees can focus on creating deeper relationships with customers.

2. Provide personalized experiences

Recognizing your guests is the first step to personalizing, for example by associating their face with a loyalty number. Using face authentication, you can leverage your CRM data to deliver personalized experiences with no effort.

By using facial authentication at self-serve kiosks, you can customize the greeting and information provided, based on their preferences. The process of personalizing the guest's journey can be extended further throughout the entire experience. A digital menu can be displayed in hotel restaurants, for example, to provide guests with a list of their most frequently ordered items based on their preferences.

People like to be remembered. It’s not about knowing all about your guests, but about being able to pull meaningful data (name, preferences, and so on) into the right context.

3. Let your customers pay by face

The holiday season is a great time to explore cross and upsell opportunities and get a boost in revenue. The guests are naturally more likely to spend more money and there are lots of opportunities to sell premium experiences or additional services.

Face biometrics simplifies payment authorization, making it more efficient and convenient. Many companies have already deployed face biometric systems where customers can confirm payment using their phone camera or one provided by the vendor. In the hospitality sector, hotels can use face authentication to allow guests to confirm their payments in restaurants, at the bar, or even during checkout.

Customers can pay by face at any point of sale and access the restaurant and other facilities hands-free. Plus, you can provide personalized offers based on guests' payment history. With a single enrolment associated with a branded loyalty program or app, you can completely revamp your guest experience and provide the right recommendations or upsell options in seconds.

What about privacy concerns?

Privacy concerns keep some business leaders from deploying face authentication solutions in their companies' processes. Note that face authentication and face recognition aren’t the same: face recognition is about matching a person’s face against a database of face images, while face authentication is about matching a person's face against a prior enrolment that the user has created for some purpose and is a consented process.  

The main concerns about face authentication are identity ethics and data protection. With all the data privacy discussion across the several industries, customers are more demanding, asking how and when their data is being used. How are the face images stored? Who can access it? Who owns the biometric template?     

Companies and regulators are working on making face authentication more private, in line with individuals' expectations. In order to build a well-functioning internal market for artificial intelligence systems, the EU Commission is working toward the AI Act, a regulation that addresses the risks and benefits of AI systems at the European level, giving users confidence to adopt them.

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the data collected for a face authentication process is considered personal data and is protected to the highest degree. Face authentication solutions should comply with data protection regulations, making sure that personal data is protected from leaks.

These privacy frameworks have been incorporated into state-of-the-art face authentication solutions, where there are no user pictures stored, only encrypted biometric templates. User biometric data is stored on their trusted mobile devices or using decentralized methods. Images are discarded after they're converted into biometric templates and only the user who created the biometric templates can access them.

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Key benefits of biometric authentication for the hotel

Biometric authentication improves traditional processes and creates efficiencies that enhance the guest experience in a number of ways. As people become more comfortable with using biometrics in everyday life, they will come to expect that the same ease of identity verification will be available to them for purchases and experiences, including hospitality.

By implementing biometric identity verification systems, hotels are enabling:

• Quick and convenient check-in experiences.
• Personalized experiences.
• Cross and upsell opportunities.

How can you offer these features to your guests?

YooniK developed a registration mechanism that allows hoteliers to seamlessly verify users' identity using a personal identity document, face verification between a live picture and the identity document, and anti-spoofing/liveness checks to detect a real user performing the registration.

YooniK Identity Verification enables scanning documents from 138 languages spanning 248 countries and territories and it’s easy to deploy: with a plug and play mentality, it will take minutes to have it integrated into your application. And if you have questions regarding our software, you can book a 15-minute conversation with our experts — they'll be glad to help!