GLOBAL – A leading hotel chain has produced an innovatory way to jump check-in queues and get straight into your room using your phone.

Nordic Choice Hotels and OpenWays have teamed up to produce Mobile Key DUAL© with Pure NFC.

The program changes the way people access hotels to make the whole process much quicker and easier for the customer. Nokia is helping, too, and supplying a whole heap of Nokia N9’s to the cause.

Nordic Choice Hotels is the leading hotel chain in Nordic countries and OpenWays is the leader in hotel access via mobile phones. So, it makes perfect sense that the two companies would want to work together for this program.

In the spring of 2012, these two companies will kit-out several hotel sites – yet to be announced – with Mobile Key Dual combining CAC™ (Crypto Acoustic Credential) and NFC technologies onto their hotel room doors. Pure NFC means there’s no need for operators to get involved and instead anybody wanting to use this technology, can. Providing you have an NFC-enabled phone.

The aim of Mobile Key DUAL© with Pure NFC is to offer all hotel guests the option to bypass the front desk, go straight to their rooms and simply gain entry by presenting their phone against their room lock. The digital key is sent to your phone via a data connection of any type once you’ve registered and open up the app.

Mobile Key also works in tandem with key cards said Pascal Métivier, Founder and CEO of OpenWays:

“It is a mobile based front desk bypass solution. It’s an optional service offered to guests that prefer not to stop at the front desk and it’s all about freedom of choice and efficiency. Many travellers wish to go straight to their room after a long journey rather than having to go to the front desk for a traditional check in.”

This makes standing in queue at the check-in desk a thing of the past. Instead, just walk into the hotel, go straight to you room and use your NFC-enabled phoned. No waiting for the person in front of you to settle their bill. No filling in forms. No waiting for room allocation. Just walk in and check in at the room with just a touch of your phone.

As part of the deployment with Nordic Choice, Nokia provided Nokia N9 handsets which have been provisioned with a special app that’s been developed using Qt. This app is the interface between your room lock and your phone. It enables you to check-in, check-out or even displays a map of the how to get to your room, should you need it.

With NFC-enabled phones gradually hitting the market – and Nokia declaring that all future Symbian phones will have NFC – anybody with such a phone should be able to interact with the world around them, by just touching their phone against it. The Mobile Key DUAL© with Pure NFC is another great example of technology being used to make the mundane things in life less boring and time consuming.

Would you use an NFC-enabled phone as an access key? Let us know, in the comments section below.

Image credit: Bohman