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Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors”

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Re: Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors”

#351

Post by btilly »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #247
grishka wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

30 years ago it was possible to check into a good US hotel with cash under an assumed name. That is pretty much impossible now; they want to see your ID and a credit card. It might still be possible to pay cash in fleabag hotels; I don't know.

That was not my experience 30 years ago.

I know that because the experience of being turned away from hotels while driving across country was why I applied for my first credit card.

Re: Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors”

#352

Post by gblargg »

delusional wrote: post #331
idiotsecant wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we got some wires crossed somewhere, my government is helping them beat me up more ...

Assuming you live in a democracy (we'll see if America still counts in 3 years), elect a better one.

[flagged]

Re: Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors”

#353

Post by ndkap »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #135
DudeOpotomus wrote: post #100

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 t…

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.

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

Re: Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors”

#354

Post by blibble »

hansvm wrote: post #148
lxgr wrote: post #132

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!…

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.

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

Re: Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors”

#355

Post by gpm »

const_cast wrote: post #307
gpm wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No... it could be false positives, it could also be that almost no one (~1%) of smokers were caught before and this is actually a miracle technology that detects smoking. Frankly it tracks that almost no one was caught before.

> Frankly it tracks that almost no one was caught before. How? How does this track? Cigarette smoking is very conspicuous. I know, I used to smoke. It's not easy to hide! If you smoke inside, it will smell like smoke . Fabric and even plaster in walls will hold onto smoke for a long time. Not to mention the smoke smell goes under doors, too, so someone outside the room could smell it. If someone smokes in a room and…

Eh, just because most people don't report most rule violations... And on the flip side most organizations don't really encourage their employees to report rule violations.

Hotel cleaning staff could be an exception, I don't know, it would strike me as a mildly but not hugely surprising one.

Re: Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors”

#356

Post by siliconc0w »

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.

Re: Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors”

#357

Post by ndkap »

Eisenstein wrote: post #291
hinkley wrote: post #209

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. S…

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 marke…

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?

Re: Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors”

#358

Post by grues-dinner »

mustyoshi wrote: post #303
WWLink wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

It's in the ballpark if you include all energy source for the family.

100 rooms times, say, 50W (5kW) is 43,000kWh. That's over 10 UK families of 4-5 (4100kWh/yr) for electricity, or 2 if you include gas usage. So for Americans, it's probably must closer to parity.

The fridge does dump heat into the room, so it has a small additional penalty for the aircon in hot countries, but a small, but inefficient compared to a heat-pump, heating offset in cold countries.

Re: Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors”

#359

Post by hinkley »

SoftTalker wrote: post #299
hinkley wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this is a statistics trope. “Our revenue has grown 50x this year” always means “our revenue was and now it’s ” Because when your revenue goes from $10 million to half a billion, you just say that. Percentages are papering over bad initial or final conditions.

Drug companies do it all the time. They market something as providing a "50% reduction" in some metric and in the fine print you find it's a change from 0.5% to 0.25% in occurrence.

50% reduction in death rate sounds impressive until you find out it’s 3 out of 8 billion people, true.

Re: Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors”

#360

Post by pnw »

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.

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