Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors”

https://twitter.com/_ZachGriff/status/1945959030851035223

882 479 1 year ago

https://www.restsensor.com/

consp2• 1 year ago

Ironic they have plenty of "hotel bad because smoke smell" and none of the "hotel bad because of fake smoke detection fine" testemonials on the site.

alanfranz• 1 year ago

They also cover vaping. While smoking harms are clear and its impact on room smell is evident, the connection is pretty weak for vaping. Unless it’s a crowded bar with lots of vaping people, I can’t tell if somebody has previously used an e-cigarette or vaporized anything in a room, and generally speaking I don’t find such vapor disturbing (altough the smell can be not great).

yonatan80702• 1 year ago

I found that people vaping around me causes minor irritation in my eyes, and I also find the smell rather annoying, despite my sense of smell being rather weak.

I haven't noticed any long-term effects on rooms with frequent vaping though

windows2020• 1 year ago

A colleague experienced this but I don't recall where. But they were furious about it and it was a challenge to get resolved.

WarOnPrivacy• 1 year ago

Synopsis and excerpt:

    [Rest] markets itself as a way to "unlock a new revenue stream"
    with the help of a "robust algorithm" for detecting smoking.

Hotels where these sensors are installed rack up complaints and negative reviews, after Rest sensors register false positives - thereby unlocking that revenue stream for the hotels.

The awesome thing about black-box algorithms is they can't be challenged when they're wrong. And errors reliably favor the institution that manages (and profits from) them.

spondylosaurus• 1 year ago

I scoured their website to look for any clues about how it might (allegedly) work and got a fat lot of nothing.

Rest constantly monitors room air quality, using a proprietary algorithm to pinpoint any tobacco, marijuana, or nicotine presence.

So a smoke detector with an "algorithm" attached. Uh huh. How does that algorithm work?

By analyzing various factors and patterns[...]

Some cutting edge shit here!

And as for accuracy, they don't even pretend to make promises about "99.99% success rates" or anything. This is the most detailed they get:

Q: Is it accurate?
A: Our sophisticated smoking detection algorithm has been tested for accuracy in real-world scenarios, backed by years of development, and tens of thousands of hours of rigorous testing and validation.

yjftsjthsd-h• 1 year ago

Our sophisticated smoking detection algorithm has been tested

Okay, but what were the results? https://xkcd.com/1096/

kotaKat2• 1 year ago

It's going to be similar bullshit to what Halo uses in the highschool vape sensors. A bunch of particulate sensors for like PM1, PM2.5, PM10, sniffing out VOCs, and then they consider any tripping of any of that to be a "smoke" sesh.

Edit: Oh. Rest is just NoiseAware. They're just reselling NoiseAware sensors which are just - yes - a bunch of particulate sensors hooked up to an ESP32 hooked to a web dashboard.

mrb2• 1 year ago

Given that this image: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/653a9fbd1075088b6c8f8bd3/... shows PM2.5 and CO2(ppm) it may imply they monitor particles and CO2 levels. My guess is it also monitors humidity, and temperature. Humidity helps distinguish smoke from water vapor (eg. steaming shower).

CO2 sensors are generally pretty accurate, but PM2.5 sensors are notoriously prone to false spikes usually caused by dust in or around the sensor: https://www.reddit.com/r/Awair/comments/10r1uyo/inaccurate_p... or https://forum.airgradient.com/t/unusual-pm2-5-readings-on-ne... or https://community.purpleair.com/t/what-to-do-about-incorrect...

My guess is it's likely a sensor in a hotel room accumulates dust over time, leading to high PM2.5 measurements maybe when something (eg. suitcase) bumps against the case, shaking the accumulated dust and releasing it around the sensor.

Aeolun2• 1 year ago

This is like those 10k bomb detectors that were just a box with wires dangling out aren’t they?

I do not understand what possesses people to buy this stuff without proof.

raverbashing• 1 year ago

A: Our sophisticated smoking detection algorithm has been tested for accuracy in real-world scenarios, backed by years of development, and tens of thousands of hours of rigorous testing and validation.

I would be willing to bet a good amount of money they have a huge pile of nothing on this

On the other comment they say they monitor PM2.5, CO2 and humidity. Congratulations, your hot water shower with hard water just triggered the sensor. $500 fee.

consp2• 1 year ago

The awesome thing about black-box algorithms is they can't be challenged when they're wrong. And errors reliably favor the institution that manages (and profits from) them.

Doesn't the US have false advertisement rules/scam prevention? Around here one person would have to fight this in court to tumble the whole thing down as there is no way Rest can prove it's claim is airtight (pun intended) due to simple statistics and physics (e.g. hair drying leaves burn particulates as well). I doubt it will even come this far as it's obviously a money making scheme over the customers back and acts in bad faith ("The sensor's don't make mistakes" is a claim to innocence where none is valid as almost everyone can smell). It's probably fine as an early detection agent but you'd have to actually check.

Also the charges are disproportionate to the beach of contract, unless they steam clean the room every time they claim the money. Which they obviously don't according to the "dirty room" comments.

gorbachev• 1 year ago

Hotel guests are not buying the sensors. The hotels would probably have a claim due to this, but since they're "unlocking new revenue streams", they are probably not going to bother.

gamblor9563• 1 year ago

You're not wrong. A single class action lawsuit would destroy Rest as a going concern, assuming there were enough false-positives generated to be an issue.

(Rest would have to demonstrate how its technology works in court in order to have any hope of defeating such a lawsuit. And as the hotel guests don't have contracts with Rest, they aren't bound by any arbitration agreements.)

high_byte• 1 year ago

"unlocking revenue stream" is wild way to say theft

adrr• 1 year ago

I bet it’s also a rev share model. Hotel doesn’t pay for the device but revenue is shared. Like the traffic cameras where they shorten yellow light to durations that a car is incapable of stopping in time.

walterbell3• 1 year ago

Primitive contract asset tokenization. What other parts of the hotel-customer contract could become zero-capex financial instruments powered by ambiguous surveillance data, washed in health and safety?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_tokenization

   Asset tokenization refers to the process of converting rights to a real-world asset into a digital token on a blockchain or distributed ledger. These tokens represent ownership, rights, or claims on tangible or intangible assets and can be traded or transferred on digital platforms.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/sec-tokenization-exemption-ge...

SEC.. considering changes that would promote tokenization, including an innovation exception that would allow for new trading methods and provide targeted relief to support the development of a tokenized securities ecosystem .. Atkins said the movement of assets onchain is inevitable, stating: “If it can be tokenized, it will be tokenized.”

progbits2• 1 year ago

So aside from Rest being incompetent morons ("temperature changes" from smoking??), they now also have incentive to make it trigger as much as possible.

kotaKat2• 1 year ago

Check the App Store screenshots - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rest-by-noiseaware/id644925142...

The app even tracks the whole fee amount in-app being collected. "Net charge", "adjusted charge amount" reasons of "guest complaint"...

like_any_other• 1 year ago

Like the traffic cameras where they shorten yellow light to durations that a car is incapable of stopping in time.

One reckless endangerment in the first degree charge per every car passing through such an intersection. That is a class D felony, with a maximum penalty of 5-10 years prison time. Per car.

RajT88• 1 year ago

Hello from Chicago!

WWLink2• 1 year ago

What's messed up about red light cameras is they can actually be useful - if used correctly!

The correct use case is "We seem to have a problem with red light runners at this intersection, so let's find out why by temporarily deploying red light cameras here."

I've seen this done and the city in question found out. They were able to make some changes to the light timing and at several intersections, that caused the amount of red light runners to drastically drop. (It was stuff like the left turn light not turning green when the straight forward light did).

stogot• 1 year ago

I assume if it’s triggering on car exhaust or something from opening room windows

Proofread0592• 1 year ago

Windows at these kinds of hotels usually do not open at all.

grishka4• 1 year ago

Hair dryers are mentioned several times, so I would assume one of the things these sensors look for is a rise in the air temperature.

belorn• 1 year ago

I would assume it was triggered by insects crossing the sensor. Optical smoke detectors are common in hotels.

yellow_postit• 1 year ago

Watch it turns out you can tune the FP rate like how casinos can set the win rate on slot machines.

chii2• 1 year ago

The awesome thing about black-box algorithms is they can't be challenged when they're wrong

I want to call this "responsibility laundering". You get money, but wash away any responsibility, thus cleaning it.

wwweston• 1 year ago

The more stuff is managed by algorithms, the more it’ll become important that there is a legal right to challenge them and even hold those who adopt or implement them some kind of accountable.

sodality2• 1 year ago

There’s a great book about this called The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies.

RainyDayTmrw2• 1 year ago

"We didn't know our vendor would do so badly." wink wink nudge nudge

lowbloodsugar• 1 year ago

Sure they can. Sounds like a class action too.

variadix• 1 year ago

Trading the long term reputation of your company for short term profits. What could go wrong?

unglaublich• 1 year ago

Nothing, it's a problem for future leaders. This is how modern economy works.

izacus• 1 year ago

Nothing, it worked and keeps working for most of the companies, especially if they have sufficient market share and ability to prevent competition.

762236• 1 year ago

Is there a way to deactivate the sensor if you find one in your room?

staplers2• 1 year ago

That could open a whole world of legal punishment for you far surpassing a small fee on your bill. Fire safety laws and such.

Not that I think this is a good thing but the framework is there to make your life hell if you were caught doing this.

nkrisc• 1 year ago

Tape a Tupperware container over it like every college student does in their dorm.

const_cast5• 1 year ago

They're disrupting the scam market by creating new and innovative ways to scam customers out of their money.

Seriously, why does every company these days seem to be running scams? You don't need that! You already make money - just keep doing that!

CommenterPerson• 1 year ago

This escalated with the Mag 7 and surveillance capitalism. Now everyone wants to do it. Good for margins!

mihaaly• 1 year ago

Actually when an algorithm results in something false, then you do not have to challange it, it is just simply wrong.

Insisting and charging somoking based on implicit and obscure ways of a "revenue stream generating" detector is a pure scam or fraud. Those involved in this criminal endeavour should be procecuted.

I will avoid Hyatt just in case and discourage my social circles too, warning them! No-one needs this sleazy treatment.

alistairSH• 1 year ago

Does Hyatt corporate have any say in this? Pretty sure many hotels are licensing the name, independent managed, etc.

Ie you’re just as likely to find these at an other brand hotels too.

xyzal• 1 year ago

Yet when you try to impose legislation regulating black-box algorithms, suddenly it's among the HN crowd the Big Bad EU choking businesses and stifling progress, vid the recent AI agreement discussion.

vineyardmike2• 1 year ago

Regulating "algorithms" doesn't mean banning. If an algorithm is used to make a decision, a human should be in the loop. There is no way these smoke detectors have any real algorithmic complexity, it's just a vague word used to hide intent and responsibility. How the EU AI agreement, focused on copyright and security, relevant to this?

I can write an "algorithm" that uses hotel data to determine if you should be charged a penalty. Now we can't question it because it was an algorithm.

def charge_extra(data): return True

octo8888• 1 year ago

Looks like hotels looked at the car rental industry and took a lot of inspiration.

burnt-resistor5• 1 year ago

Airlines: "Hold my beer!"

walterbell3• 1 year ago

"Delta moves to eliminate set prices, use AI to set your personal ticket price", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44596355

hotboxin• 1 year ago

Looks like nothing a little duct tape couldn't handle.

nielsbot• 1 year ago

Why should I have to waste my time and duct tape on their shitty scam? :) Easier to just never stay at a Hyatt.

burnt-resistor5• 1 year ago

Duct tape adhesives (including polyterpene resin) might register as VOCs. Now, if you duct taped a piece of absolutely clean aluminum foil to it, then that could be fine.

gblargg• 1 year ago

I'd take the opposite approach, put something in the room that continually triggers it so they keep coming up and then just ignore it eventually.

octo8888• 1 year ago

"Fire Safety Device Interference Fee: $1,000"

bell-cot• 1 year ago

IANAL - but might doing that sift the burden of proof, and force Hyatt to show that the Rest device met regulatory standards as a fire detector?

anthonyeden• 1 year ago

I have seen tradies attempt to ‘disable’ smoke particle detectors by putting tape or a rubber glove over the sensor. This technique often triggers the alarm almost immediately.

Commercial fire sensors do have plastic caps which block airflow without triggering an alarm. They’re designed to be kept on during construction until each sensor is commissioned.

rdtsc• 1 year ago

I asked Erik if the room needed to be cleaned [...] And he said it wasn't needing special cleaning so he offered me $250

Well that sort of says everything we'd want to know. They charged the customer $500, like they'll need to tear up the room and bring in a large team to clean everything. But they never bothered with that because they know it's a scam, and the company selling these knows exactly how their customers will use these.

Unsurprisingly, the customers just love this new technology and can't get enough of it:

(review from https://www.restsensor.com)

"Rest’s in-room smoking detection service has helped us capture a lucrative ancillary revenue stream while also improving our guest experience." Kirsten Snyder, Asset Manager, Woodbine

madaxe_again• 1 year ago

Wait, woodbine? A hotel literally owned by/named after a cigarette brand? You literally couldn’t make this up.

clort• 1 year ago

Largely a property development company, named after a geological feature "Woodbine Sand", in Texas

[1] https://woodbinedevelopment.com/woodbinedevelopment.com/our-...

southernplaces7• 1 year ago

> "Rest’s in-room smoking detection service has helped us capture a lucrative ancillary revenue stream while also improving our guest experience." Kirsten Snyder, Asset Manager, Woodbine

At least this chain mentions using lubrication while shafting its customers.

Animats• 1 year ago

Here's a "vape detector" with more explaination.[1]

It contains an air particulates detector and a CO2 detector, plus humidity, temperature, and noise and light sensors. They're probably looking for particulates and CO2 ramp up, hence the "algorithm". It's not clear how accurate this is, but it's not mysterious.

There's a version sold to schools that adds "bullying detector" capability. This adds detection of "keyword calls for help, loud sounds, and gunshots."

[1] https://fobsin.com/products/mountable-air-quality-vape-detec...

laborcontract• 1 year ago

It sounds ludicrous to say out loud, but if you're staying in a Hyatt hotel, it's best not to take a hot shower until this issue is resolved. The steam from the showers tend to make these types of particle sensors go wild.

amluto3• 1 year ago

Even outdoors, humidity is a problem. Humidity turns little particles into bigger, soggier particles that give higher readings on optical sensors, which can rather inflate readings on cheap sensors in humid or foggy conditions. There’s a reason that the actual EPA particle counting standards involve drying the particles before measurement.

(RIP, EPA.)

MiddleEndian2• 1 year ago

The smoke detector in my previous condo used to go off all the time when I showered. Had to remove it shortly after moving in lol

gamblor9563• 1 year ago

The issue is not a Hyatt issue. It is an issue with a specific hotel that happens to be a Hyatt.

leoedin• 1 year ago

Why would CO2 be caused by vaping? And surely the amount of CO2 caused by a cigarette is dwarfed by the amount exhaled by a person?

gpm4• 1 year ago

A person outputs about 1kg of CO2 per day, which is less than 1 gram per minute. A cigarette weighs roughly a gram, which means it probably emits roughly 3 grams of CO2... or less... (The O2 comes from the environment, and weighs 32 to carbons 12, but the cigarette isn't actually pure carbon).

I don't know... that's maybe detectable? You'd need a pretty sensitive CO2 sensor and to be tying it to other signs to avoid "someone else walked into and out of the room"... but in principle...

whycome• 1 year ago

(Smoking) computer says no.

4b11b4• 1 year ago

This reminds me of Hertz new "AI" camera based damage detection... Although much less effort... This is the end. May progress have mercy on our souls.

burnt-resistor5• 1 year ago

Hertz is a running joke meme on Steve Lehto's channel, an automotive Lemon Law lawyer Youtuber.

octo8888• 1 year ago

Knowing Hertz, the 360 degree camera scan still won't be proof that you didn't steal the vehicle from them

tgsovlerkhgsel• 1 year ago

I think both of these "innovations" will be short lived once companies recognize that reputation is still a thing, and once you build a reputation of scamming your customers, it's very hard to recover from it and the revenue from the scams isn't enough to make up for the revenue lost because nobody wants to deal with your company anymore.

kayodelycaon• 1 year ago

People still use Hertz despite them reporting cars as stolen and having their customers arrested.

jdenning• 1 year ago

This seems like outright fraud - how can they charge a cleaning fee and then perform no cleaning?

octo8888• 1 year ago

Just like how car rental companies can charge damage fees and not repair it (thus charging it multiple times for multiple customers!)

deanc2• 1 year ago

Time for the EU to legislate on this. Car rental companies should be required to provide a detailed report to the customer on the damage allowing the customer to challenge any potential cost estimation (with reason) that the rental car company provides. Then the rental companies should be required to prove to the customer the damage was fixed and provide the invoice.

burnt-resistor5• 1 year ago

Or apartment managers charge a "cleaning fee" when it was already proven clean.

yonatan80702• 1 year ago

Exactly my thinking. If I get this smoking charge but haven't smoked, I should be able to go to my credit card provider and tell them to get me my 500$ back

tialaramex• 1 year ago

Leases often work this way. In theory it's illegal in the UK (for a home, businesses are assumed to be big boys who can negotiate on equal footing) but it's still pretty common to be charged when you move out. Specifically UK law says "reasonable wear and tear" is just an expected cost of people living in a house you let to them - so e.g. they're going to wear out carpet after some years, but a cigar burn is not OK, the walls won't look pristine but there shouldn't be graffiti, that sort of thing. They should vacuum floors but it's not reasonable to expect dust to magically vanish from every nook.

In practice in many cases you move out leaving the place very habitable, you get told they "had" to clean up your mess, and it's a suspiciously round number like £80 and they have plenty more "necessary" charges like this. In theory in the UK they're required to provide receipts showing their actual expense, but in practice they're looking at this as free revenue and most of their clients can't fight back.

I was buying, freeing me from the obvious revenge if I say "Fuck you" but there were a lot of other things to do for the move and having fought them down from the original outrageous fees they wanted I gave up although I did get as far as reporting them to their regulator and threatening legal action. In hindsight I'm quite sure I could have got to $0 and possibly also got the most senior woman who was straight up lying and clearly had done all this many times removed from the register of people fit to let out properties, but I didn't and I feel bad about that.

jplrssn4• 1 year ago

They absolutely prey on people not being having the time/resources to fight back.

A friend in the UK had his deposit withheld as "mail charges" by his landlord upon moving out. Turned out the fine print in his lease said that he wasn't allowed to receive mail at the house he was legally renting.

FireBeyond4• 1 year ago

I had friends whose landlord attempted to charge them cleaning fees for an apartment that they were renovating down to the studs (and had told them that, etc. They'd been working through the complex.

They had to go to small claims. You can't claim a repair fee for some scratches and dents in drywall that you had crowbarred out the day after vacation of the property.

heisenbit2• 1 year ago

Lost my deposit in the U.K. way back so it is not a new phenomenon. Landlords were lawyers so I figured it is not worth fighting especially from abroad.

Symbiote• 1 year ago

I've received thousands of pounds back twice, by arguing my case with the Deposit Protection Scheme.

It wasn't difficult, though it helped that I'd taken lots of pictures on the day I moved out

IncreasePosts• 1 year ago

Do you know they don't do cleaning? They might bring an ozone machine into the room or something

Maybe it should be called an accelerated asset deprecation fee.

dawnerd2• 1 year ago

I bet Rest just uses a cheap voc sensor and triggers when a set threshold is hit. I doubt there's any algorithm involved.

burnt-resistor5• 1 year ago

Yep. And these things trigger from things including hairspray, nail polish remover, nail polish, microwaved food, and more. I'm constantly watching "VOCs" on a cheapo Amazon AQM change whenever I cook.

ekidd• 1 year ago

Yeah, stovetop cooking makes your VOC and particulate numbers look like a bad day on an LA freeway.

The other thing that's surprisingly nasty for air quality is incense. You might live in the woods with excellent air quality, but burn some incense and suddenly all the VOC and particulate numbers look like downtown Manhattan. It's ironic that incense is a massive air pollutant, but not really surprising.

amluto3• 1 year ago

Having played with an SGP41 (a current-gen VOC sensor), you cannot correctly do anything involving a threshold. The sensor has a couple of nasty properties, all well documented in the datasheet:

- It has a lot of low frequency noise (timescale of hours to days), so you need to do some sort of high pass filter.

- The responses to different VOC compounds don’t even necessarily have the same sign.

So the sensor gives you a “raw” reading that you are supposed to post-process with a specific algorithm to produce a “VOC index” that, under steady state conditions, is a constant irrespective of the actual VOC level. And then you look at it over time and it will go to a higher value to indicate something like “it’s probably stinkier now than it was half an hour ago”.

This, of course, cannot distinguish smoking from perfume or from anything else, nor is it even particularly reliable at indicating anything at all.

Modern PM2.5 meters are actually pretty good, although they struggle in high humidity conditions. But they still can’t distinguish smoking from other sources on fine particles.

jojobas2• 1 year ago

some sort of high pass filter

Quite some algorithm you got there!

jddj• 1 year ago

Yeah, since 2023 or thereabouts all of these chips claim AI anyway.

serf• 1 year ago

if you think a 'cheap sensor' is doing much of anything without the involvement of an algorithm somewhere then might I suggest you try to use (any) cheap sensor.

algorithms are one of the only things that make cheap equipment usable. That cheap voc sensor is going to be a noisy mess on the line.

dawnerd2• 1 year ago

I do use them throughout the house and I didn’t have to write a single algorithm because the libraries available handle that for you. What I was meaning was they don’t have any magic sauce. The most I can see them doing is maybe est voc greater than x for y duration.

I guess you could pedantically say see that’s an algorithm! But you know what they’re heavily implying in their marketing…

whatever1• 1 year ago

What if the product is just a random number generator?

SoftTalker10• 1 year ago

Probably detecting the VOC from the synthetic carpet and mattress.

const_cast5• 1 year ago

It would be more profitable, and honestly probably more accurate, if the sensor was just a plastic box and then the app rolled a random number.

chneu• 1 year ago

Tire shops do this by siping your tires and then offering you a refund if you complain that you never wanted it. But they do it without asking to everyone and then charge $60 hoping nobody notices.

octo8888• 1 year ago

Unbelievably brazen to not bother trying to push an upsell, and just charge it without authorisation. Crazy

lisper• 1 year ago

Siping?

shawn_w• 1 year ago

Cutting into a tire to improve traction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siping_(rubber)

BlackFly• 1 year ago

I'd refuse to pay the charge on check out. If they charged my card anyways I would demand a refund and inform the consumer protection agency, wait 30 days and issue the chargeback. Luckily these things work well in my nation.

sneak• 1 year ago

AmEx used to be good about doing chargebacks generally, but they once sided with the merchant during covid when I was sold an impossible itinerary and cost me $2k.

Since then I realized that I won’t always be able to do a chargeback, and I am much more cautious with vendors.

wombat-man• 1 year ago

Chase was really weird about doing a chargeback for me when a restaurant charged me a second time under a different name a month after my visit. It took several phone calls and they eventually credited my account but they would not do a chargeback. Two identical charges a month apart. I could show that I wasn't even in the same state for the second one.

csomar• 1 year ago

I think there are exceptions about "exigent circumstances" and COVID was considered one. My EU flight was not refunded as well despite the EU having strong protections. The airlines, at the time, were given a life-line.

I think these once in-a-decade or more events can be swallowed. But wouldn't be happy with a regular occurrence.

dangus3• 1 year ago

Well the point is you can’t really refuse it. They won’t rent you the room unless you have a card on file authorized to make charges for incidentals.

blibble2• 1 year ago

the fact they have a card on file is irrelevant

they're not allowed to make up charges wherever they feel like it just because they have your card details

the payment doesn't settle for something like 6 months anyway

jzwinck2• 1 year ago

Not about smoking but I recently stayed at a W hotel and was woken in the middle of the night by the room lights turning on. They used electronic push buttons and I turned them off. Seconds later they turned on again. This repeated several times until I was fully awake and called the front desk.

"We can come put tape on the sensors."

"What sensors?"

"There are sensors under the bed."

"Oh, so you already know about this problem but haven't fixed it. Thanks, please don't send anyone."

I then looked under the bed and sure enough there was a motion detector on each side. I removed these from their brackets and let them dangle facing the floor instead of outward. This blinded them and solved the problem. I guess they were malfunctioning or they were able to detect motion above the bed via reflections.

The next day I reported this to the front desk, who were unsympathetic and unhelpful. They told me it was for my own safety. Apparently at other hotels I have just been incredibly lucky not to have fallen down when getting out of bed.

I will not stay at a W hotel again unless I can confirm in advance that they do not have motion detectors under the bed which spuriously turn the lights on at night. Maybe I'll add Hyatt to the no-go list.

em-bee• 1 year ago

there was a monster under your bed...

tehwebguy• 1 year ago

Stayed at a Hilton owned property recently and the fan / light used a wireless controller and someone else’s room was controlling mine!

netsharc• 1 year ago

All these gadgetry.. seems like we'll need to bring an EMP blaster to hotels to "sanitize" the room..

card_zero• 1 year ago

Strange choice, fitting rooms with a novel device to annoy guests. Do you suppose it's because somebody fell out of bed and sued? And then maybe some other people thought that was a good idea, and they fell out of bed too, and now the hotels have to have the annoying thing.

jzwinck2• 1 year ago

I find it somewhat unlikely, as this particular W hotel was not in a country known for personal injury lawsuits.

More likely it was sold to them by some interior design firm as a luxury feature. Unfortunately it's only helpful if you're alone--even if it worked correctly you wouldn't want the room lights turning on just because your spouse got up.

SilasX• 1 year ago

Oh wow I ran into problems with those too. When I brought my cats to a Hilton, they would get the zoomies and run around at random in the middle of the night, which would make the lights turn on. I think I found some way to block the sensor.

quickthrowman2• 1 year ago

Why the hell would they put occupancy sensors below the bed that trigger the overhead lights, that’s an absurd solution to people tripping and falling at night, provide a nightlight that costs $2 instead of (2) $100 occ sensor/relays.

Possibly the issue was they used PIR/ultrasonic (aka dual-tech) sensors and the ultrasonic one was picking up vibrations, I’ve seen that happen in tenant spaces before and turning down the ultrasonic sensitivity fixed it.

I run electrical work and if I was asked to install these, I would’ve written a sarcastic RFI to make sure the customer actually wanted to do something this stupid and expensive vs a $2 nightlight in a receptacle.

Marsymars4• 1 year ago

I don’t know about $2, but for $35 you can get some nice motion-sensing nightlights, e.g. https://casper.com/products/glow-nightlight

spauldo7• 1 year ago

Perhaps no one asked them to make a little birdhouse in their soul.

dreamcompiler6• 1 year ago

Stayed at a Marriott property in Germany that had these. Got up in the middle of the night to pee and the automatic lights woke up my partner.

I carry black electrical tape whenever I travel. It's marvelous for disabling sensors and covering up too-bright LEDs that light up the room all night.

Marsymars4• 1 year ago

Do you take the tape off when you leave?

spauldo7• 1 year ago

I'm staying at a Candlewood in southern California and they've got motion sensing light switches for everything. They mostly go to plugs, though, and whoever stayed in the room before me unplugged all the lights. I left 'em that way. The bathroom light came on automatically blinded me three times a night when I'd get up to pee until I got in the habit of reaching in and hitting the button before stepping into the bathroom.

Automatic lights in private spaces are just a hassle.

abbadadda• 1 year ago

This is a microcosm for enshittification writ large. If no one cares about your individual complaint you’re fucked. Only in numbers do consumers wield any power. The 48 Laws of Power says, “what is unseen counts for nothing.” So make it seen. Make bullshit like this visible. And vote with your dollars. Better yet sue the smoke detector company. Make them demonstrate their flawless false positive rate in court. Bullshit, grifting companies keep getting away with stuff like this because there are no consequences. Make them feel it where it hurts the most: their bank account.

datahack• 1 year ago

I have a startup idea for you my friend…

walterbell3• 1 year ago

Paging DoNotPay.com bots..

ddingus• 1 year ago

"enshittification writ large."

Good grief! We are actually going to have a shit list now:

Hertz, Hyatt are the first two entries in this historic development..

neonate• 1 year ago

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1945959030851035223.html

cpard• 1 year ago

From their FAQ:

   "Is it worth the investment?

Absolutely. Hotels equipped with Rest have seen an 84x increase in smoking fine collection. Plus, our smoking detection technology helps prevent damage to rooms and reduce a number of future violations."

Apparently there are way more people smoking than we thought there are or the sensor just generates a lot of false positives.

The language they are using all over the site is very interesting though, see here an example:

From how it works:

"Automatically charge

If smoking is detected, your staff gets notified, simplifying the process of charging smoking fees."

With a system with false positives, it makes total sense to use real time notifications to staff to go and check what's going on, that would be legit, but then on top saying that you automatically charge?

It almost feels like they are selling a way to fraud to their customers while covering themselves against any litigation by using the right copy in there to support that it's the responsibility of the Hotel staff to go and check in real time that the violation is actually happening.

jfengel5• 1 year ago

Is there that much smoking in hotels? Do they charge more for smoking rooms?

A number like 84x suggests that it's basically zero now. That kinda makes sense. The only one who would notice is the cleaning staff, and relying on their word for "it smelled like smoke" sounds like a way to get a chargeback. They'd call you on it only if they were forced to take the room out of rotation to air it out.

So maybe there are a lot of people smoking just a little (perhaps a joint), and getting away with it. That might make a number like 84x work.

vkou7• 1 year ago

A number like 84x implies that it's almost entirely false positives.

ludicrousdispla• 1 year ago

The last time I walked into a hotel room that smelled like cigarette smoke was in 1998, so I would think this is very uncommon.

BeFlatXIII• 1 year ago

I can't imagine people getting charged by this system not doing chargebacks.

gamblor9563• 1 year ago

Is there that much smoking in hotels?

Surprisingly, yes. Smoking experienced a significant uptick during COVID.

Post-COVID, a lot of the housekeeping staff wear masks when cleaning guest rooms, so they're not always able to notice the smells that a guest would notice upon first entering the room.

I've had to get 3 out of my last 10 hotel rooms changed because the previous occupant smoked. On my last business trip, this resulted in an upgrade to a suite because they had no more regular rooms available.

cowsandmilk2• 1 year ago

I’m fairly certain that most US hotels, you will get complaints from the neighboring rooms about someone smoking. I don’t think you need to rely on the cleaning staff for detection.

autarch• 1 year ago

I can think of two instances in the last 10 years where I've stayed at a hotel and had my room become disgustingly full of pot smell from someone else in the hotel. So yes, people smoke in hotels.

That said, I haven't smelled _cigarette_ smoke in a hotel in recent memory.

UltraSane• 1 year ago

This is Fraud as a Service.

palmfacehn• 1 year ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651

amelius• 1 year ago

Hanlon's razor doesn't cut it anymore.

hiatus• 1 year ago

I personally believe Hanlon's razor should never be applied to corporations. A solitary person, sure, but when multiple people are involved it tends more to malice than ignorance.

xnx• 1 year ago

Next step: Hertz installs these in their cars.

justlikereddit• 1 year ago

The MBA way to earn money of AI and automation.

"Computer says pay me $$$"

"Why"

"AI demands it!"

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF2• 1 year ago

So someone does not smoke in their room but they’re charged for cleaning anyway because a third party (Rest) told the hotel that they smoked in their room. What sort of evidence should one gather during their stay to make the strongest possible (defamation? fraud?) case against Rest? (Not that anyone wants to do that on their trip, just curious about the legal implications.)

jfengel5• 1 year ago

Would it work if it were real time? You light up, and five minutes later a manager knocks.

Dunno about the legality of refusing to open the door, but it does sound like a way to get banned from a hotel chain.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF2• 1 year ago

Yeah, that’s totally fair. At least they’ll have testimony that the smoking was actually witnessed. Most people aren’t going to even bother fighting that since it actually happened. I just worry about abuse cases and the most obvious one here is false positives being assumed true by everyone who profits from them.

Edit:

Sorry, that’s from the wrong point of view but I don’t think the answer changes. It seems Rest will have to change a lot of their marketing language to really avoid liability but if someone is actually caught smoking then it’s not likely to manifest.

zeroonetwothree3• 1 year ago

Generally you have no rights in a hotel to prevent entry.

goopypoop3• 1 year ago

Is it reasonable to make "use your body to test for carcinogens" part of the manager's job description?

xg15• 1 year ago

From the thread, it sounds as if they don't even pretend this is about cleaning, they're just saying "we're a smoke-free hotel, so smoking costs $500 as a punitive measure, period".

I wonder if they could legally separate this from any real-world activities completely? During check-in, put a clause in the contract "if our partner company says so, you have to pay $500 extra. By signing, you agree to that" - without any reference to smoking at all.

I hope this wouldn't be legal, but it sounds like it could be.

DudeOpotomus5• 1 year ago

Religious freedom may come into play here. Incense and candles are a basis for many faiths so assigning a fee on people practicing their faith will cost them in court and in payouts.

DudeOpotomus5• 1 year ago

If I got one of these I'd pay it and never, ever, ever stay at any hotel owned by the entity again. Being that I spend $25k-50k a year on hotels, their loss is a small hotel's gain.

In fact, whoever does this will lose my business ahead of time as I will never stay at any hotel that uses this service. A few minutes on Tripadvisor and you'll know.

Such incredible business myopia. Hotels are one of the few businesses that loyalty is not only a boon, but a necessity for survival. Without brand loyalty, hotels suffer.

vintermann• 1 year ago

Often I wonder if some scammers (and this is totally a scam) basically pay a premium to feel like they've outsmarted people, or for the smirking satisfaction that their victims can't do anything about it. Some scams are so much work for so little gain, or so obviously counterproductive in anything but the short term, that it seems like that.

DudeOpotomus5• 1 year ago

No, it's just stupidity and myopia. Like those screens that replaced glass beverage cases in liquor stores a few years ago. Not one customer liked them. Not one customer wanted them and the results were beyond terrible. People literally stopped buying. But people actually invested millions into that company and other people actually bought their products and thought "gee this is great". Imagine how disconnected you have to be from your customers to make such an investment and/or installation for a few bucks? Stupid is as stupid does...

NewJazz2• 1 year ago

The hotel chain probably had no input into the decision to add this. Hyatt is just a franchise for many hotels. Call up /email the chain's corporate folks and tell them about the charge and that you'll not stay in their chain of hotels unless they can guarantee the devices are banned from the franchise. If you really spend that much on hotels every year your demand would at least raise some eyebrows.

zeroonetwothree3• 1 year ago

It’s tricky because the chains (like “Hyatt”) don’t actually own any hotels. They are generally owned by local ownership groups and it can be hard to figure out the real owner.

That’s also why one Hyatt could be 5/5 and another 1/5. The chains don’t do a great job of quality control.

hn_throwaway_99• 1 year ago

That's a cop out. What's the point of a brand if quality control is all over the place?

Most McDonald's are franchises, and they famously give very similar experiences wherever you are. Not identical, obviously, but a Big Mac is a Big Mac.

This is absolutely on Hyatt corporate. They should have policies regulating these types of detection systems.

DudeOpotomus5• 1 year ago

This isnt exactly true. They do not own the property but their contracts give them full ownership over policies and processes of the location. It's an essential part of their brand by the way, to assure continuity.

ndkap2• 1 year ago

If Hyatt is providing its name for a fee, then Hyatt indeed has responsibility for this incident

photonthug2• 1 year ago

Without brand loyalty, hotels suffer.

Executive decision makers won't though. It's clear that consolidation in many sectors has gotten to the point that consumer power is an absolute joke and "ignore them, abuse them, and just defraud them" is a standard business model. Even if there's litigation.. this crap just overwhelms services so that basically the public pays twice. Witness the situation where various attorney generals have said that Facebook outsources customer support to the taxpayer when the attitude for handling everything is simply "don't like it? so sue us, good luck"

For anything smaller than Facebook though, it's hard to understand why brands/investors/business owners tolerate their decision makers encouraging wild abuse and short-term thinking like this, knowing that after brand loyalty is destroyed the Hyatt leadership will still get a bonus and fail upwards to another position at another company after claiming they helped to "modernize" a legacy brand. Is the thinking just that destroying everything is fine, because investors in the know will all exit before a crash and leave someone else holding the bag? With leadership and investors taking this attitude, I think it's natural that more and more workers get onboard with their own petty exploitation and whatever sabotage they can manage (hanging up on customers, quiet-quitting to defraud their bosses, etc). And that's how/why the social contract is just broken now at almost every level.

DudeOpotomus5• 1 year ago

This is what actually kills brands. The funny thing is our collective memory is short, so a brand killed by poor product and bad decisions is often revitalized by PE a few years later, because of brand recognition.

b1122• 1 year ago

I wonder if the company making the detectors, pitched them on a free install.

They sound networked, so what if they only get cash, every time there is a hit? So the hotel is getting 1/2.

And with contracts like these, come with hefty fines if people back out. Even if the hotel now realises it's too sensitive, lots of false positives, the hotel now has to prove it, or pay big.

If the hotel refunds the guest, the hotel still owes the fee!

Quite the trap for the hotel.

mrandish• 1 year ago

Sounds similar to the red light traffic camera revenue sharing scam. Free or discounted install and then revenue share. Both the supplier and location owner have every incentive to trigger false positives to make more money. In both cases this 'business model' is exploiting asymmetry in power dynamics.

Also, in both cases it's subverting and abusing a cost-effective technology which, if used appropriately, could be beneficial and all-around positive. If it was really about stopping illicit smoking in hotels, preventing annoying other guests with the smell and potential extra cleaning, the front desk would just call the room and say they got an alert on the smoke detector and will have to send someone up if it triggers again. If people are smoking/vaping, they'll very likely stop. Problem solved. Instead they silently stick a charge on the bill received at check out, proving what they really care about.

Because of this scummy money-grabbing misuse of the tech, it will get a terrible reputation and consumer push back like boycotts, lawsuits, regulation or banning will eventually lead to it being restricted even for appropriate, beneficial applications. The same thing happened with red light traffic cameras. My city banned them without ever adopting them because of the abusive scams happening in other cities. It's sad because when someone blows through a red light at high speed long after the light changed to red, it can kill people. Fortunately, that's quite rare but it does happen. Since the potentially life-saving use was too rare to be a big revenue opportunity, those cameras became all about catching someone trying to slide through a yellow light a quarter second after it turned to red, which happens more frequently (especially when the company shortened the yellow light time) but is also almost never a serious risk of injuring anyone since cross traffic is still stopped or not in the intersection yet. And now we lost the potentially life-saving beneficial application due to some assholes trying to scam people.

HWR_142• 1 year ago

It's not myopia. The hotel owner only owns one or two locations. They damage the national brand but they make more money for themselves. As long as new people loyal to Hyatt keep coming to their location, they are fine.

Of course, that's why Hyatt imposes standards on their hotels to keep the name.

NewJazz2• 1 year ago

And those standards always need updating to keep up with social norms, new technologies, consumer expectations, et cetera. Hence my recommendation to start by communicating with Hyatt or whatever franchise.

munsonbh• 1 year ago

They undoubtedly wouldn’t charge someone like you. They would overcharge people who do not have an existing or potentially lucrative relationship with them, like families in town for a wedding.

dangus3• 1 year ago

I saw a little quote about the modern business landscape that seems to apply here:

“Save a few pennies by destroying trust.”

The Hyatt franchise needs to shut this down ASAP. Most hotels are independently operated or operated by franchise groups. Not many hotel brands actually own the hotels and essentially act as marketing firms.

If I were to give this the “never assign malice to that which can be adequately explained by incompetence” benefit of the doubt, I think some bozo hotel manager got sold this innovative “solution” and implemented it without thinking much about it. Then they got their revenue and probably thought to themselves “Wow I knew the smoking problem was bad but I didn’t know it was this bad!!”

Meanwhile they are slow rolling the death of their location by tainting guest reviews, which are the lifeblood by which you justify your room rates.

mouse_• 1 year ago

Never assign incompetence to that which can be adequately explained by greed.

octo8888• 1 year ago

My new favourite saying!

dreamcompiler6• 1 year ago

Remember when hotels charged outrageous fees to make a phone call from your room? That scam no longer works because everybody has a cell phone. Then they tried charging high fees for watching movies on the room's TV, and high fees for wifi. Those no longer work because everybody expects hotel wifi to be free and unlimited LTE is a thing now and nobody uses the TV in a hotel room any more.

Obviously this is just the latest such scam. Accuse people of smoking, refuse to show them the evidence, and charge them $500 to be split between the hotel and the sensor company.

Reminds me of the UK post office scandal where hundreds of innocent people went to prison because of software errors when the powers that be insisted the software was perfect and no auditing was possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

Yet again we have normies believing marketing bullshit that says "our proprietary algorithms are foolproof." We need laws that say any algorithm that can accuse a person of wrongdoing must be auditable and if it harms innocent people, the CEO of the company is both civilly and criminally liable.

jasonjayr• 1 year ago

“A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”

CamperBob22• 1 year ago

I've never understood this old saw. The computer is just a tool. Somebody owns the computer, somebody installed it, somebody loaded software onto it. That's who should be held accountable.

Taken at face value, you couldn't even use a pocket calculator to back up a management decision.

blantonl• 1 year ago

Between this and Hertz's new AI damage detection models, we're seeing the enshitification of business travel reaching a new level, and also doing a great job of really ticking off a group of customers (business travelers) who are already irritated enough.

Rest markets itself as a way to "unlock a new revenue stream"

Leave it to the bean counters to see this as an opportunity to generate new revenue streams from customers while simultaneously pissing them off.

washadjeffmad• 1 year ago

There have always been attempts to launder fraud through intermediaries - computerized, bureaucratic, or otherwise. They think (well, know) if they abstract or obfuscate things in a novel way, that they'll have enough time to hit markets across states without sophisticated legislation before the legal immune systems can respond, potentially years later.

This type of algorithmic grift is transparent to judges and people with common sense, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of interest at or outside of the federal level through regulators like the FTC to prevent it, just curtail certain circumstances.

Havoc• 1 year ago

“unlock a new revenue stream”

Monetizing fire safety. Lovely.

Appears this company rebranded from NoiseAware. More tech to monitor "valued" guests...this time on noise levels

andrepd• 1 year ago

It's the consequence of growth capitalism. When it's not enough to make money, you have to make more money this quarter than you did last, then it's really only a matter of time until everything is monetised under the exclusive logic of greed, devoid of any other considerations of a moral or human order. Public goods, water fountains, libraries, beaches, forests. Basic state functions. Your attention, at every moment. On it marches.

hdgvhicv4• 1 year ago

The stock market grows by 10% a year. Worker income only grows 2% a year. Those aren’t sustainable.

rsync• 1 year ago

"It's the consequence of growth capitalism. When it's not enough to make money, you have to make more money this quarter than you did last, then it's really only a matter of time ..."

Agreed.

An environment of increasing interest rates exacerbates this.

quickthrowman2• 1 year ago

Vape and smoke detection is not fire safety. Hotel rooms have 2-4 hour fire rated partitions (unsure on duration), typically have their own HVAC not linked to outside the room (and if there is central HVAC the supply and return ducts have fire smoke dampers), and are usually sprinkled.

toast02• 1 year ago

I guess there's some aspect of fire safety, because cigarettes are smoldering and can start fires. But I've been in hotel rooms where a previous occupant was smoking enough that the room smells, and it's not pleasant. It doesn't happen often now that most hotels are declared non-smoking, at least in my experience.

I don't think I'm in favor of black box smoking detectors either. I'd guess housekeeping reporting the room for smoking during cleaning and a 2nd person verifying would be enough to bill a smoking fee and that would drive compliance. Sometimes you miss a room, and customers complain, and you deal with it then. Better than the sensors said X and we didn't follow up with our noses.

kittikitti• 1 year ago

I don't understand why so many commentators are acting surprised at this morally dubious company. Many if not most companies coming out of YCombinator are just as bad. Just one case is uBiome. In fact, I would argue that YCombinator and the startup culture they create directly enabled companies to do exactly this.

lxgr13• 1 year ago

There has got to be a way to penalize companies for attempting this kind of thing. Even just removing the charge without discussion isn't enough, as some people will be traveling on a corporate card they don't necessarily monitor closely, will confuse the charge for something else etc.

Otherwise, I'd love to be able to preemptively and without any prior communication charge (way in excess of the room rate, of course!) hotels for broken appliances, poor cleanliness etc., and put the burden of proof that everything was fine on them.

hansvm2• 1 year ago

The big problem is the power imbalance. There's a reason they start your stay by putting a hold on a credit card. And even if you could charge them, they can afford a legal battle better than you.

lxgr13• 1 year ago

Oh, that's a common misunderstanding, but they can't sue me in court – by accepting me as a customer, they accepted my binding arbitration agreement! It clearly said so on my luggage tag their authorized agent (i.e. the bellboy) handled as part of check-in.

newAccount20252• 1 year ago

Can’t you do a charge back? Isn’t this a key kind of protection that credit cards give you?

grishka4• 1 year ago

Do hotels in the US not allow you to pay with cash any more? What if you don't have an internationally accepted card?

torlok3• 1 year ago

Is this a US thing? I stay at hotels from time to time across Europe, and I always pay a fixed price either when booking or at arrival for the whole stay. Never had to enter credit card information anywhere, and I never would precisely for this reason. I put my credit card information once when booking a car at an airport and was scammed with random scratches being found at return. Can't imagine ever going through that again. One of the worst and most infuriating money exchange experiences in my life.

blibble2• 1 year ago

what power imbalance?

obviously if you give them cash deposit there's not much you can do, but with a credit card you can easily dispute the transaction

I always pay my bills in full and on time, but if a merchant tries giving me the run around I will simply dispute the transaction and then the pain moves entirely to them

with a credit card the power imbalance is entirely in the consumer's favour

abtinf• 1 year ago

Seems like a candidate for class action lawsuits against the hotel, the brand, and the sensor company?

mindslight6• 1 year ago

Class action lawsuits are a boon for corpos. They take what should be many separate instances of fraud with unknown unknowns and tie them all off in one small garbage bag. Half the money goes to the attorneys and the other half is a token payment or even just funds a coupon to encourage doing more business with the perpetrator.

I'd really like to see some service that facilitates you opting out of a class action, and then comes in later representing you for your own individual case (at scale) based on the implicit admission of wrongdoing from the settlement plus documenting actual damages.

mindslight6• 1 year ago

It's called the criminal justice system, specifically the longstanding laws against fraud. But it requires effective government to implement, and government has been becoming ever less effective at such things (it tends to give corpos a pass based on diffusing responsibility rather than properly charging everyone involved with criminal conspiracy)

Another pillar of the problem is the corpos having excepted themselves from basic libel/slander laws through the "Fair" Credit Reporting Act. The common response should be one round of "piss off, prove it", with then a high barrier for the fraudster to substantiate such a debt in a court of law. Instead people are put on the defensive by the thought of such lies going on their permanent surveillance records, and perhaps becoming some kind of problem in the future.

dangoodmanUT• 1 year ago

Yes it's called a lawsuit for defrauding consumers. Hopefully someone actually does it though

pyman2• 1 year ago

I'm sure the hotel will blame the company that sold them the sensors, and the company that built them will blame some developer who changed the sensitivity value from 6 to 8. Everyone will act shocked, the developer will get fired, and the new revenue stream will be called "customers who visited adult websites on a shared private network." I doubt that will end up on TikTok :)

bgilly• 1 year ago

There is a way. Don’t give them any of your money.

mindslight6• 1 year ago

So now the debt they claim you owe is partially valid...

(Yes, I'm being obtuse. In response to a simplistically obtuse point)

pluc• 1 year ago

There has got to be a way to penalize companies for attempting this kind of thing

Yes, don't go to them.

Love,

Canada

chrismsimpson• 1 year ago

Yeah, it’s called regulation and consumer protection.

ysofunny• 1 year ago

put the burden of proof that everything was fine on them.

as if they need more incentives to surveil everything

mvdtnz• 1 year ago

In most countries there would be no wondering if there are ways to penalize the companies. This is flagrantly against the law in most of he civilized world and it wouldn't last 5 seconds.

make3• 1 year ago

Well, if you had kept Lina Khan at the head of the FTC and not elected Trump, the country could work on continuing to improve consumer protections.

xkq4hiupload• 12 months ago

This is what the federal consumer protection board was created and designed for, but now all of that has gone when this administration fired them and closed it.

northhnbesthn• 1 year ago

Oh yeah I have one of these installed at my place. Every time I walk in I hear a cha-ching from their mobile app. Another $250! It’s like free money in my pocket.

heisenbit2• 1 year ago

Looking at one of these pictures it seems the device is not fitted to the ceiling but 30cm above ground. So not the best place to pick up CO or to detect fire.

toast02• 1 year ago

CO disperses well, so there's no need for a CO detector to be mounted at any particular height. They're now commonly sold as combination smoke and CO detectors, so placing them at ceiling height is appropriate.

I don't think this thing has a smoke detector though?

Zigurd• 1 year ago

Hotels don't want to be left out of the enshittification that Airbnb seems to have turned into an artform. In the travel industry, your customers are nearly captives to your whims. And if your whims are not profitable enough, the tech bros are here to make you the money while saving you the effort.

I predict that Rest will merge with Axon so that after they get a false positive in your room, a cop can barge in and taser you on body cam.

blackhaj7• 1 year ago

In the US, it feels like there is little recourse for these sorts of changes.

Consumer protections are not like in other places

Drunk_Engineer• 1 year ago

https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/cobb-county/marietta-hotel-...

hinkley3• 1 year ago

Reminds me of cities shortening yellow lights to make money off of red light cameras.

The thing is that the cameras are supposed to make the public safer. That’s what they are meant to do. But they’re so expensive that you need a certain number of tickets to offset them (but whoever heard of public safety being a profit center instead of a loss leader?).

It’s a proven fact that short yellows lead to more accidents. So these red light cameras make everyone less safe. Public endangerment to try to balance a budget.

Eisenstein2• 1 year ago

Markets are efficient at extracting value from things, but what that value is needs to be determined before we blindly create a market for it. In the traffic light case you mention the value is money, when it should be safety. Traffic lights are installed to ensure traffic flow and safety, so getting a monetary return on a safety device should be non-sensical, but here we are.

We should not be involving private market players as partners in 'investments' with public organizations tasked with public good, or else we get misaligned incentives since the partners both expect different types of returns.

lblume2• 1 year ago

How do you actually create aligned incentives though? Goodhard's law, cobra effects and generalized coordination problems really do seem pervasive.

ndkap2• 1 year ago

Any efforts to veer the incentive of the market from profit towards vague things like safety or others (DEI, ESG) has been criticized and rolled so far. Can we really make the market prioritize anything other than profit?

RainyDayTmrw2• 1 year ago

What's that famous quote? First as tragedy, and then as farce? If the British Post Office Horizon was the tragedy, this may be the farce.

dbg31415• 1 year ago

Man, I hate when companies do this kind of thing.

Also...

Man, I really hate checking into a hotel room and getting hit with that unmistakable “someone vaped in here” smell.

It was so nice traveling in parts of Asia where vaping is banned. I’d honestly rather deal with cigarette smoke outside, where I expect it, than that overly sweet, plasticky vape air inside. It’s like someone boiled a Jolly Rancher in a humidifier.

bjt12345• 1 year ago

I kept finding my balcony door ajar in my hotel room - an employee was smoking on my balcony.

pknomad• 1 year ago

I wonder if this is an actual Hyatt owned and managed property or is it a hotel brand associated with Hyatt. I also wonder what category of hotel it is.

Before we call it enshittification of the Hyatt brand as a whole, I am kinda curious for more details.

I would be very surprised if this happened on places like the Andaz or Park Hyatt but would not be surprised if it was like at a House or Place.

schneems• 1 year ago

As a FYI: This is unreadable by me and anyone without an X account. I see the first post and that’s it.

agent327• 1 year ago

Since we are talking about hotel-related scams, I might as well mention getaroom.com and hotelreservations.com. These scum duplicate entire hotel websites (including logos and everything), and will claim to reserve a room, but when you click on the "go to confirmation page" link, they will quickly up-charge you by hundreds or even thousands of dollars - and they will charge that before you have a chance to confirm. And while some people apparently managed to get a reservation this way, there are also reports of people ending up without any reservation. In other words, they are a full-on scum. Check trustpilot if you don't believe me.

So to summarize:

- Massive unexpected up-charge. - Credit card gets charged before you even click the final confirmation button. - Doubtful if you even get a reservation.

Stay away from these sites, and others like them, at all cost.

In case you wonder how my adventure ended: they added $800 to a $1600 reservation. I complained, and was eventually told that they would refund me, _if_ I did not do a charge-back on my credit card. A few days later they, amazingly, kept their word, so I didn't lose any money.

crmd• 1 year ago

In a healthy marketplace, customers stop using merchants that abuse customers, until they change their practices or go out of business and are replaced by more customer-responsive competitors.

Here in the US, however, 5 hotel brands have been allowed to control over 70% of hotel rooms nationwide. This means a dispute with even one will cause big problems for business travelers.

Same thing with Ticketmaster/Live Nation, Google, Amazon, etc.

This extreme consolidation of market power seems to me like a degenerate form of capitalism that breaks my libertarian idealism.

dv_dt• 1 year ago

If there is a fire in the building does every single guest get a smoking fine?

Or if there is a prolific smoking guest can they set off detections in neighboring rooms? Hmm

Also this seems like any excuse for hotel management to avoid having real interactions conversations with the cleaning staff who are perfectly competent to discover if a room has been contaminated by smoke.

spauldo7• 1 year ago

Cleaning staff are weekly in every hotel I've spent more than one night in for the last several years. It's "eco friendly," they say. I'm sure getting to fire most of the cleaning staff has nothing to do with it...

I could probably get away with smoking in the room for the day or two after they clean. Not that I would - I stay at hotels that have covered smoking areas outside and I enjoy the company I meet.

breppp• 1 year ago

this is going to be a bad decade for the 1% false positives of a 99% accurate neural net

recipe19• 1 year ago

It reminds me of a hotel I stayed at that had a stocked mini-fridge. Removing any item from the fridge resulted in an automatic, silent charge. Putting it back did not remove the charge. So if you simply took something out to check it in, or if you wanted to chill your own beverage, they counted that as consuming the item.

They removed the charges if you checked the bill and objected at checkout. But how many people don't look? I'm sure it generated enough revenue to pay for the sensors. No one is going to say it out loud, but false positives are the point.

nickdothutton• 1 year ago

Got billed (via corporate) for this because I put my own coke in a beer can slot and found myself in an interview with HR about it later, very strict no alcohol policy on company expenses. At the time I was tea total.

mr_toad• 1 year ago

teetotal.

hackyhacky• 1 year ago

tea total.

If it was totally tea, why were you drinking coke?

orochimaaru• 1 year ago

Most hotels that have this will tell you this at check in. That’s the refrigerator is the mini bar/snack bar and don’t use it for personal items.

breakingcups• 1 year ago

What they don't tell you is that you can request/demand a second fridge for medical reasons and don't have to explain any further. Take that for what you want.

WWLink2• 1 year ago

Those things should just be illegal. I can't even imagine how much energy and plastic/paper/food goes to waste in those damn things.

mustyoshi• 1 year ago

An entire hotel probably wastes less from the mini fridge specifically than a family of 4 for a year.

schwartzworld• 1 year ago

I was at a hotel recently with packaged snacks on a tray, cookies crackers etc. There was a sign clearly explaining that moving anything off the tray results in an automatic charge. Thank god we didn’t have the kids with us.

scoofy• 1 year ago

This kind of thing is so penny smart, pound foolish. If I ever see that sign, it's immediately going on my Instagram, telling everyone I know to never stay at such a place.

I'm still never staying at AirBnB's when it actually matters because they completely screwed over my gf when she booked a bachelorette party and the owner literally sold the property without cancelling the reservation and the new owner rebooked the same site, also using AirBnB. AirBnB just offered a refund, even though the monetary damages were easily 10x the cost of the reservation and obviously permanent in the fact that in ruined a major life event.

Say what you want about the amount of money your company will make. Reputations take a lifetime to build, and most people have a grim trigger when it comes to being screwed over.

ValentineC• 1 year ago

Some hotels let you call and request for the items to be removed, to avoid trouble at check out.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan2• 1 year ago

That's pretty standard in American hotels these days though. You don't touch anything you don't intend to pay for. It's to prevent people from drinking the booze and refilling it with water.

There are always signs, but if you goof they'll always take the charge off, but you do have to be upfront about it and tell them before checking out, otherwise you'll be charged.

northern-lights• 1 year ago

Seems like this is standard for every hotel in Vegas.

jwr2• 1 year ago

I am amazed that hotels are still stuck in this old mindset of charging exorbitant amounts to some customers (unpleasant to customers) rather than providing a good service to all customers (good for customers).

If I knew that a hotel chain will have my room fridge stocked with beer at reasonable prices (small markup or even no markup, because this does not need to be a revenue stream!), I would pick that hotel every time. Just for the convenience, and the nice feeling of not walking a minefield.

danpalmer• 1 year ago

The problem is that renting rooms is pretty low margin. Hotels typically need to pull up the average margin with addons like this to make the business worthwhile.

oatmeal12• 1 year ago

It's funny that the disruption to hotels - Airbnb - Does what you're complaining about but 100x worse

jmbwell• 1 year ago

I once had hotel staff show up right after I checked in saying they needed to check on my fridge. They spent a weird amount of time going over it. I hadn’t even looked at it, but it turned out to be one of these. Later I began to suspect they suspected me of messing with it. Now I kinda wish I had been

sitharus• 1 year ago

Wow that’s wild. I never touch minibars anyway, but I have been known to look at the contents! Guess I won’t now.

Though here in New Zealand most hotels I’ve gone to over the past couple of years don’t even stock the minibar anymore, it’s just for milk and optional extras you book with the room.

bloomingeek• 1 year ago

Outrageous! We always stay, if we don't pull our travel trailer, in $100 a night hotels when on the road in the states. They will take cash for the room, but require a debit or credit card in case there's damage or fridge items usage. Neither of us smoke and always ask for a non-smoking room. To think this could happen is other worldly.

tushar-r• 1 year ago

I'll probably pay 10 - 20% more for an "old school" hotel room with a clock radio and standard phone to call the front desk. No other "non-essential" electronics other than multiple well-placed power points. No TV, Coffee Machine either.

The number of bright screens on random "smart" controls that I'm trying very hard to hide before sleeping are too much.

userbinator3• 1 year ago

A traditional motel may be suitable, and even cheaper.

spuz• 1 year ago

And you will because "entrepreneurial" chains like Hyatt will lower their prices thanks to the additional revenue they get from this and other unexpected charges in order to attract more customers.

mgraczyk• 1 year ago

The reality is that most people who smoke/vape indoors will lie about it. I've witnessed this hundreds of times from hundreds of people. In every place I have lived I had neighbors who smoked (illegally) and lied about it to my face until I saw them doing it. I would bet that the system is 98%+ accurate and we are seeing the (many) false positives.

Obviously hotels should not use these unless there is some higher accuracy appeals process, but as a nonsmoker I do wish that there were universal and near certain fines for smoking indoors.

Simon_O_Rourke• 1 year ago

Very scummy behavior from Hyatt hotels. I'd always check out the negative reviews of hotels before booking, and this might have caught it

siliconc0w• 1 year ago

Always check the bill, there are a slew of bullshit dark park-patterns here like charging you for stuff in the mini-bar you didn't take or pay-per-view you didn't watch.

In a normal market system, you'd think a business that routines tries to fraudulently charge their guests would be punished but either by the government or the customer but due to consolidation or just the total acquiescence of customers to this kind of abuse it's just business as usual.

pnw• 1 year ago

https://www.restsensor.com/ is the new name for https://noiseaware.com. They got started making a 'noisy party' sensor that is monitoring the audio in your hotel room or AirBNB. You can see the Noiseaware branding on the sensor in that X thread.

So it's not just a $500 scam, it's also a privacy issue. I had no idea these audio sensors were even a thing.

strathmeyer• 1 year ago

Whenever someone charges me a smoking fee I assume they are just saying they don't want me staying there. I'll find some place either much better or much shittier that is appreciative of my business. The Hilton Garden Inn in Princeton NJ has charged both my and my wife a smoking fee on different dates because we were hiking. In Denver you aren't allowed to smoke on the streets, there's no terraces in the hotel, so we were charged a smoking fee after hot boxing our car. They aren't cleaning the room. It's ten cents of spray and an open window at most. I've stayed at hotels where they Febreeze every room daily. What a scumbag thing to do to your customers.

Mistletoe• 1 year ago

All I can say is I will never stay at a Hyatt from reading this, so Hyatt and Rest and whoever owns that hotel can sort it all out. I don't smoke.

mmmpetrichor• 1 year ago

It would be cool if we had real journalism these days instead of having to find these type of reports on social media.

fortran77• 1 year ago

I see in Yelp reviews from other hotels that this is a very common problem now.

https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g60763-d93520-r9...

Look at this review from the "Park Central" in NY. The Management responded that the person agreed to this policy so it's tough luck:

Thank you for sharing your feedback. It's concerning to hear about the experience you described. Park Central Hotel New York is dedicated to maintaining a smoke-free environment for all our guests. As per our website, smoking tobacco, pipes, vapes, e-cigarettes and marijuana are strictly prohibited within the hotel. NoiseAware is a smart device that allows hotel management to respond to smoking events without disrupting your stay. You hereby agree and consent to the use of such sensor in your room and acknowledge and agree that it is 100% privacy compliant and required by the hotel. By acknowledging the foregoing, you agree to waive any future claims related to the presence of the sensor in a room you may book. Tampering with the sensor is strictly prohibited. A non-refundable $500 smoking fee will apply should a smoking event occur inside the hotel guestroom. We regret that this policy did not meet your expectations. The consistency in handling such situations is important to us, and your experience will be reviewed to improve our protocols.

wlonkly• 1 year ago

Based on the thread and the replies to the thread, it sounds like this is a particular (franchised) hotel, and there are other (franchised) hotels in other brands that are using the same revenue stream. So boycotting Hyatt will not let you avoid ending up at a hotel with these things.

missingcolours• 1 year ago

Yes, I feel like it's important to clarify that this is one specific hotel which happens to be associated with Hyatt, not a general program instituted by Hyatt or any specific chain.

If Hyatt refuses to address this scam after being made aware of it, that's a different story, but for now this is a story about specific hotel properties' wrongdoing.

1oooqooq• 1 year ago

Btw, this is exactly what palantir sells. Pseudo technology to justify whatever you pay it to justify.

calmbonsai• 1 year ago

WJW. Yeah, this definitely seems like a scam.

1) Always, always look over the receipts of your expenses.

2) When possible, use a dedicated 'travel' credit card for these sorts of things to minimize impact on other accounts.

3) Line out that charge, photograph the receipt, and offer to pay only for the rest of the bill. If that's not acceptable, you can walk away or pay it and then immediately issue a fraud alert on the account. Not a dispute, but a fraud alert.

4) With few exceptions, credit card providers is the U.S. will not process a dispute on the account until the transaction is no longer "pending". That usually takes 2-3 business days.

5) Use that 2-3 day window to communicate with hotel management regarding this issue.

6) If the hotel will not budge, flag the charge as 'fraud'. Upload a photograph of your lined-out receipt to your credit card provider. Never use that particular hotel again.

7) If you don't have privacy concerns, share it on social media.

MaintenanceMode• 1 year ago

This is in line with Hertz rental car rolling out car scanners to detect any small ding or whatever, to "unlock a new revenue stream." Every single cent will soon be extracted from our pockets. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a65176049/hertz-ai-scan-re...

unixfox• 1 year ago

https://xcancel.com/_ZachGriff/status/1945959030851035223

pardner• 1 year ago

Can we talk about hacking, this being hackernews?

A few comments claim the sensors can be triggers by non-smoking events such as hairspray, nail polish remover, perfume...

If that is accurate it seems to me one could exploit that sensor flaw by purposefully triggering a false positives with some benign action - and video record doing so - perhaps a couple of times.

Then if and when smoking is alleged, obtain a log of the alleged event times, then provide video evidence that debunks at least one alleged smoking event.

A relatively small number of activists could probably create a viral nightmare for Hyatt and anyone else implementing this system.

nedt• 1 year ago

„Smoke detectors don‘t lie“ might be true, but not everything they detect is always smoke.

In my building all flats have one. It gets triggered by workers cutting a hole in the wall or people cooking. We covered it when we had the fog machine for Halloween because that surely would have triggered it. Almost every time it went off it was a false alarm.

Which is also the second thing. It should never be silent. If it detects it needs to report audible and someone should come to your room. What happens if there is smoke because of a fire? We always had FD coming to our flat.

Algorithmic might sound smart but in the end it might just a boy that cries wolf.

Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors”

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