Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors” (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

> “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

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

This is Fraud as a Service.

„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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Hanlon's razor doesn't cut it anymore.

Next step: Hertz installs these in their cars.

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.

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

Consumer protections are not like in other places

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.

(Smoking) computer says no.

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.

The MBA way to earn money of AI and automation.

"Computer says pay me $$$"

"Why"

"AI demands it!"

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

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.

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

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.

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.