Starwood Hotels & Resorts will soon begin a pilot program that will let hotel guests use their smartphones as a means to check-in and also as a hotel room key.  Ideally, this would mean that you could skip the check-in desk altogether and go straight to your hotel room, which I’m sure many would agree sounds incredibly convenient. The app, called the Starwood Preferred Guest app, will be updated to leverage Bluetooth and make this functionality possible. According to the company, the iPhone 4S or newer or Android devices running 4.3 or later will be compatible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4d3NmO4-_k

Only two hotels will be part of this pilot program initially (Manhattan and Silicon Valley), but if successful the company plans to roll it out across all its locations by the of 2015. Let’s hope Starwood doesn’t run into any issues (hint: security-related) and that this becomes the hotel norm in a couple of years.

[via WSJ]