Technology Fails Locking Guests Out of Hotel Rooms
Guests at the Denver Marriott Tech Center would have loved a set of hard keys to their rooms on New Year’s Eve because, as if by magic, a computer malfunction locked every guest out of their hotel room. And locked the elevators shut.
Bad enough, but this was just before the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve.
TNooz, the tech-talking travel web site, reported that moods of the guests quickly went from happy and celebratory, to downright mean as arguments broke out and the cops were called.
With every keycard frozen, guests had no place to go except crowded guest areas, and in the four embarrassing hours it took to fix the problem, many revelers had to sleep in the corridors.
The local TV station, Colorado’s Channel 9 ran a video of the catastrophe showing very upset guests, several of whom were sick, making their feelings felt on air.
Hotel manager, Rob Neilus, was in the painful position of explaining to the TV audience and his guests what went wrong.
He said the company was working with the lock manufacturer to figure out what the problem was, and didn’t charge the locked-out guests for the night’s lodging, or non-lodging.
The least he and Marriott could do.
Fortunately, other Marriott hotels were not affected, only the 628-room Denver property. But for those guests, the event was not an auspicious beginning to 2012!
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