by Brianna Crandall — June 29, 2015—Bringing a new level of convenience and efficiency, a new service now allows guests of The Woodlands Resort and Conference Center near Houston, Texas, to open their hotel room with their own smartphone. LEGIC was selected to provide the resort with its secure and trusted service, LEGIC Connect. The service deploys smartcards onto smartphones at the touch of a button.
The Woodlands Resort and Conference Center with its 406 rooms is the first hotel in Texas to provide its guests with this special experience, which allows them to access a room, call an elevator, or open external entry doors by simply holding a personal smartphone up to the reader, says LEGIC. This new, state-of-the-art technology is provided by LEGIC Connect and Kaba’s mobile access solutions.
At the Woodlands property, which is owned by The Howard Hughes Corporation, LEGIC Connect facilitated a fast mobile setup, and now it ensures a reliable and highly secure guest experience, says the company. Based on LEGIC’s Software Development Kit, the Woodlands’ own app was created.
Simple and efficient
The new guest experience is simple: guests book their room on Woodland’s Web site and download the free hotel app. As soon as their personal room is ready, they receive the Bluetooth-enabled room key wirelessly onto their mobile phones. They no longer need to queue at the reception and wait for a key card. Klaus U. Klosa, LEGIC’s managing director, is convinced of the new technology: “LEGIC Connect not only relieves administrative work for hotels, it also reduces costs and improves guest satisfaction.”
LEGIC recently published a free value calculator that hotels can use to calculate their individual potential cost savings.
Security first
Using Connect, the process of deploying electronic room keys to cell phones is fast, simple, secure and stays in the background, says the company. The heart of the system is a well-designed security concept by LEGIC experts with over 20 years of experience in the security industry. Two fully redundant certified data centers with several tamper-proof hardware security modules transfer an encrypted “secure authorization” to the hotel guest’s mobile phone. This authorization is only decrypted when holding the smartphone in front of the room door lock.
LEGIC Connect is a highly scalable, trusted service for the hospitality industry, implemented in several major U.S. chains and multiple property management systems. It helps hotels and lock providers to mobile-enable their services in a simple way. LEGIC Connect brings all kind of chip card applications onto mobile devices, whether BLE or NFC. Furthermore, customers are reportedly not tied to only one particular lock vendor as LEGIC has over 250 partners, many of them in the lock industry.
