Ask HN: What could I build to make your life a little easier?
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Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors”
620 RebeccaTheDev 360 7/19/2025, 4:02:57 AM twitter.com ↗
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.
Why can't there be a human membership union that sets these automatic binding arbitration agreements on service providers on behalf of members? Is there any law preventing a class of people from creating such a customer's union?
Those already exist, we call those things 'governments'.
Republic and democracy mean the same damn thing, rule by the people as opposed to rule by a monarch.
Or fantasize about? :)
It's a fun fantasy, but the fact we're happy to see it highlights our impotency - even a line worker sympathetic to the power imbalance would be left at "Anyways, we'll charge the fee to your card on file"
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
There are lots of small operators, so I doubt that there's some industry wide list.
But there are only a few large operators. I'd be shocked if some of them didn't share info.
It might still be possible to pay cash in fleabag hotels; I don't know.
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.
Possibly you can also put down the same amount they take as a hold on the card in cash, but I've never tried it.
Last time I visited the US was in 2016 and back then my country wasn't an international outcast so I had a debit card that counted as credit in the system. I'm just curious what people like me would do these days. Or maybe the hotels I stayed at were too cheap.
Unfortunately people who simply choose to live without using credit are caught up in that too.
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.
Edit: For context, the first sentence of the version I commented on was "You do realize that class action lawsuits are a boon for corpos, right?", which comes across as quite snarky. It was edited at some point.
Yes, don't go to them.
Love,
Canada
(Yes, I'm being obtuse. In response to a simplistically obtuse point)
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.
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.
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.
If it was totally tea, why were you drinking coke?
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.
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.
I want to call this "responsibility laundering". You get money, but wash away any responsibility, thus cleaning it.
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The app even tracks the whole fee amount in-app being collected. "Net charge", "adjusted charge amount" reasons of "guest complaint"...
This type of creepy stuff, together with Airbnb's horrible business practices (last time they wanted access to my checking account transaction history via Plaid!) and enabling scammy hosts, is why I'm back to just staying at regular hotels.
Sad to see some of them are now start adopting the same type of customer-hostile technology as well.
Of course Airbnbs are also a real problem in general with the way they increase the scarcity of housing, so I'm pretty happy all in all to see you saying you're being driven back to hotels.
Of course, a long term neighbor it is different. There the police would be a last resort.
Look, if you have a house in a tourist spot and you say "no parties!", you're not gonna make any money. And if the residents don't like said parties, they can rally together to make AirBNBs illegal in their area. That's how many (most?) touristy places are.
There must be a better answer than "pass a law so the american multinational does a better job at regulating its rentals"
What's the actual mechanism for airbnbs to prevent housing construction?
They are, which is why residential properties that are used as hotels should be seized and auctioned off.
No one wants to live next to an Airbnb house blasting music at 3am.
I’ll also consider these things to be microphones unless their manufacturer explicitly says otherwise, yet on their website I’ve only seen vague assurances about them being privacy-friendly.
For some, “on-device speech recognition that only sends voice samples for cloud analysis in exceptional cases” would probably also meet that bar, but it doesn’t for me.
The other commenter is absolutely right that partyers in AirBnBs cause nuisances for local residents, but the owners will have to find another way to sort that out or close up shop
it's not an incentive, it's a raison d'etre!
(People were mentioning hair dryers)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_tokenization
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.”
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).
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I do not understand what possesses people to buy this stuff without proof.
Okay, but what were the results? https://xkcd.com/1096/
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KONoeHwu2pg&t=50s
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.
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.
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.
Ie you’re just as likely to find these at an other brand hotels too.
Technically I think perfume, sweat and trace amounts of smoking residue, including formaldehyde, from personal belongings could probably also raise VOCs as hotels often have very, very poor airflow by design - open windows and balconies have historically encouraged smokers so they were removed, but now you can rarely find any hotels with fresh air in the rooms, and those you find often smell of cigarette smoke for obvious reasons. (Smokers will often stay at hotels with airflow or balconies and take advantage of these features when they can. Also, airing out a room will kill a scent temporarily but only cleaning the room or replacing natural textiles will permanently remove the scent when the window is closed.)
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.
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.
There is a whole tier of hotels and other services targeted at the traveling working class which you won't encounter as a highly paid tech professional simply because your company won't book you there.
I ran into traveling road crews (as in CalTrans contractors building highways) visiting a facility for my current employer. Interesting crowd. The pay is good, and the only real requirements seem to be the willingness to wake up early, work hard, and not be insufferable to work with.
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.
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 you walk in any time in the next 12 hours, you will be able to tell. That means the cleaning staff should be able to detect smoke very well. Keep in mind, this is assuming you don't set off the smoke alarms, which is ALSO very easy to do in a hotel room because the ceilings are very low!
The only way around this is smoking outside, like on a balcony. Which, I'm sure, is against the rules too - but it doesn't harm anyone if you can't even detect it, so I'm not sure it's a problem.
Places like Vegas have a huge amount of recreational sales to tourists. They're clearly smoking the product somewhere, and it's not on the casino floor. One might bet they are engaging in some amount of activity with the potential to generate revenue for the hotel.
Hotel cleaning staff could be an exception, I don't know, it would strike me as a mildly but not hugely surprising one.
That's why they demand a deposit (or a card), by the way.
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.
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Of course, that's why Hyatt imposes standards on their hotels to keep the name.
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.
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.
Extracting rents comes in all shapes and sizes.
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.
But capital has a playbook now that's pretty effective at dodging this kind of backlash, like the "advertising without signal" thing that's also on the front page right now is pointing out. That article mentions "Disposable brand identities" which does seem relevant here even if that piece is mainly talking about the relationship between amazon/manufacturers/consumers. Part of what PE is accomplishing is brand/liability laundering, but brands head in this direction anyway before they fail. Consumers can't typically look at list of 10-20 "different" hotel brands and really tell which are under the same umbrella.
And all this is kind of assuming consumer choice exists and is still meaningful, but when you need a hotel you need a hotel. If Hyatt gets away with this abuse, every hotel will do it soon, and capital can just wait out any boycott.
Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by grift.
> front-facing sensors used to anonymously track shoppers interacting with the platform
From my (albeit limited) experience with tech platforms like this, it probably is anonymous - but they're scary good at identifying your age and gender, and what you look at before you buy. That's the data they're immediately after.
Of course, they've probably already built a "shadow" profile of you based on your mobile phone identity, so they could cross-reference that if they cared to, and then a loyalty profile they could connect to that. So, yeah... The fridge data is technically anonymous, but, you know, data can be connected together in all sorts of ways. Privacy is dead.
But no, I have not seen the coolers with video screens for doors anywhere around here either.
The what now?
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.
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.
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
[1] https://woodbinedevelopment.com/woodbinedevelopment.com/our-...
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.
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.
We can't make a market do anything. But we can at least not do stupid things tasking a private enterprise which has a duty to make profits for investors to be in charge of things which lose money if done correctly. The purpose of fines is to discourage bad behavior -- if fewer people do the bad behavior then that leads to lower income. Any profit motive for collecting fines leads to the opposite of the desired outcome.
I think it comes down to the fact that we still don't have a meritocracy. It is still very much who you know from you getting a job to a company securing a contract with government, vs anything based on actual merit or ideas that are collectively beneficial vs selectively beneficial. Same old roman republic today: making favors to enrich the senators, making spectacles to distract the masses from the senators picking the public pocket. We haven't really changed the paradigm since it was established thousands of years ago with our first chieftans and shamans and their friends elevated above the rest of the tribe.
Dunno about the legality of refusing to open the door, but it does sound like a way to get banned from a hotel chain.
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.
It would be unfair to charge people with just a black box algorithm. But a few door knocks could fix that, one way or the other.
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.
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.
Since then I realized that I won’t always be able to do a chargeback, and I am much more cautious with vendors.
I think these once in-a-decade or more events can be swallowed. But wouldn't be happy with a regular occurrence.
Covid happened and everything was cancelled. The airline refused to refund, only give credit. The issue is that it was on an airline that was useless to me because this trip was cancelled and we were going to be rescheduling.
Did a chargeback with Apple even though I was past the date, they still gave me my money back. I was shocked
Unfortunately some European banks aren't too familiar with these rules, especially when bankruptcy law is involved.
If it's the former, then your bank didn't properly handle your chargeback case. There was no Covid exemption for regular "goods/services not provided" chargebacks, which includes canceled flights.
You not being able to take a flight due to travel restrictions (even if imposed after booking) is usually not covered under that, though.
If the country entry requirements changed, that’s not the airline that’s liable - just like if the country cancelled your visa. Talk to your insurance company.
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
Monetizing fire safety. Lovely.
Appears this company rebranded from NoiseAware. More tech to monitor "valued" guests...this time on noise levels
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.
Agreed.
An environment of increasing interest rates exacerbates this.
The number of bright screens on random "smart" controls that I'm trying very hard to hide before sleeping are too much.
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...
But also, you should run the exhaust fan in the bathroom when you shower, this removes at least some of the moist air and cuts down on the chance for moisture damage and mold to develop.
But then you can't catch vapers in the most popular vaping place: the bathroom. Oh no! Our revenue stream! It's broken!
I think, elephant in the room here, smoking is conspicuous and does real, tangible damage. Vaping? I'm not so sure.
Yeah vaping is lame but does it actually harm properties? I mean, if someone vapes 10 feet from me I can't smell it. And if I can smell it, it's gone in < 5 seconds. There's no smoke in it, it doesn't linger.
But the point is that machines are not particularly good at detecting smoke lol
(RIP, EPA.)
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...
I'm skeptical about this. Normal adult tidal volume is about 500mg, with a normal respiratory rate of 12/min, so 6L/min. Normal air is about 0.05% CO2, so you're at 3 grams/minute atmospherically that is inspired and expired.
We actually output closer to 4% CO2. 240ml/minute. With the windows and doors closed in my 10x20 living space and 4 people, CO2 can easily go from a baseline 4-500PPM to over 1000 in an hour. That's not 240 grams of CO2 doing that.
https://airly.org/en/the-composition-of-inhaled-and-exhaled-...
Most figures I see peg 1mL of CO2 at closer to 2mg (it's about 50% heavier than the equivalent atmospheric volume, since that's mostly N2 with some O2). Your estimate of 240 mL / minute is about 346L per day, or about 700g of CO2. That's roughly the same order of magnitude as the cited 1 kg / person / day.
edit: Another way of thinking about it: if you scale up your numbers to grams per day, you'd end up with a ludicrous 346 kg / human / day. Multiply that by 12/44 (mass of Carbon-12 vs CO2), and that's the equivalent of a human shedding 100kg of carbon every day from just breathing. Most humans don't even weigh that much.
I don't know where I originally got that value from, it's one that has stuck in my head for years.
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.
It wasn't difficult, though it helped that I'd taken lots of pictures on the day I moved out
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.
Pretty sure that is not a stipulation you can legally put in a tenancy contract. Because both parties have to be able to serve notice on the other via post in writing. Same reason you are legally entitled to know the postal address of the landlord.
Not a native speaker. How do you refer to the pieces of paper that the Royal Mail sometimes drop through your letterbox?
This is unlike the US Postal Service, which delivers "mail".
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.
Plenty alternatives to renting a car in Europe. Hit them where it hertz. Take a punt on smaller companies that are competing with eg total all inclusive insurance. Yup they're a bit more expensive sometimes but can result in an better overall experience (there are lots of scammy local companies too)
I'd rather be charged a bit more upfront than to see mystery charges showing up on my card after I check out or return a car in the same condition I received it.
Allowing this type of stuff to go unpunished also just hurts honest businesses and distorts the market, since in travel search aggregators, the primary sorting criterion is price.
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Maybe it should be called an accelerated asset deprecation fee.
- 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.
Quite some algorithm you got there!
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.
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.
I guess you could pedantically say see that’s an algorithm! But you know what they’re heavily implying in their marketing…
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.
"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.
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.
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.
One could argue that I shouldn't because I'm "improving" their property but reasonable people could disagree about the definition of "improving." Bottom line is that it's their property and their rules but if I can make a nondestructive change to make the place more comfortable while I'm staying there, I will.
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.
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I haven't noticed any long-term effects on rooms with frequent vaping though
If such suits were successful, would the newly tested liability set larger changes in motion?
I'm similarly curious about being around Amazon Alexa, etc. devices in circumstances that require two-party consent for recording audio.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siping_(rubber)
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.
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.
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.
“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.
Maybe more relevant would be oversize/overweight baggage fees. Where there is some fine print about baggage policy and you may find yourself paying expensive fees at the gate because you didn't realize the weight limit included your handbag or that the allowed dimensions are nonstandard.
A hotel charging $500 for smoking that didn't happen is worse than all of that, it is just fraud. Personal ticket prices is just business, controversial, but they are not trying to trick you. The fine print is bad, but at least, you can avoid the fees by being careful. Here, you have no choice but to pay and maybe hope to get your money back by filing a complain.
https://www.alternativeairlines.com/fare-basis-codes-explain...
Of course as computers have gotten more sophisticated, the machine learning/revenue optimization rules have too.
For instance it costs less for me to fly Delta from MCO (Orlando) -> ATL -> SJO (San Jose Costa Rica) than it does our friends to fly from ATL -> SJO when we are both flying the same second leg.
There are other tricks to like booking a Delta flight via AirFrance or Virgin Airlines domestically cheaper.
I don't think this thing has a smoke detector though?
Consumer protections are not like in other places
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.
Taken at face value, you couldn't even use a pocket calculator to back up a management decision.
That makes no sense. I am the manager. I make the decision. The calculator gives me some numbers but I am still the manager, still the decision maker, and I can use any tools appropriate to inform my decisions. Even a calculator. Taken at face value, that's what it says. That the calculator doesn't make the management decision; a person does.
It's a content-free sentence. There is nothing special about a computer in that regard. It's a tool... a tool wielded by a human somewhere. Anyone who tries to blame "the computer" should not be allowed to do so, and it's weird that it ever occurred to anyone to try that.
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.
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.
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.
"Computer says pay me $$$"
"Why"
"AI demands it!"
Good grief! We are actually going to have a shit list now:
Hertz, Hyatt are the first two entries in this historic development..
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.
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.