Two stories caught my attention this week in which RFID is being used in innovative ways to support the touism industry. One from Canada, the other from the UK.


Guests staying at Great Wolf Resorts, Niagara Falls in Ontario will be given RFID wristbands to access rooms and pay for service during their stay while Alton Towers, in England has come up with the highly innovative idea of utilising RFID bracelets and video cameras to provide visitors with a DVD record of their day.


The Stories:


RFID Pays Way, Opens Doors At Resort


Great Wolf Resorts Inc. in April will open a Niagara Falls resort equipped with radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. The property intends to operate on cashless point of sale (POS) platforms and hotel keyless entry systems.


The Ontario, Canada, resort will become the second Great Wolf Resorts property this year to open with an RFID infrastructure design by Precision Dynamics Corp. Great Wolf Lodge Poconos, Penn., a 401-suite family resort with an indoor water park, opened in October. Great Wolf Resorts will retrofit an additional seven resorts if the technology proves successful.


When guests arrive at the Great Wolf Resorts they will be given an RFID wristband embedded with a Texas Instruments Inc. 13.56MHz RFID inlay to use while at the resort. Each guest is assigned a number. The wristband provides entrance into the guest's hotel room, and allows the guest to make cashless purchases at POS terminals throughout the resort. Parents may provide wristbands to kids for food, beverages, and arcade games.


Each wristband will act as a charge card, and guests may add funds to their wristbands at Smart Kiosks or Great Wolf Lodge POS stations. Alternatively, funds may be transferred onto the wristband using cash or credit or can be linked to the room account.


Items will be added to the account as they're purchased with the wristband. The account will then be reconciled when the guest checks out of the resort. Encrypted information on the wristband provides security.


The plan to install RFID at the resorts took three years to design and build. Great Wolf Resorts had to get buy-in from manufacturers that supply the resort with equipment.

"Early on, we talked with our arcade vendors to get change machines that would work with the RFID technology," said Kim Schaefer, chief operating officer at Great Wolf Resorts. "We had to write software for the computer systems and find a lock vendor to interface with the system."

Great Wolf Resorts spent more than $250,000 on payment systems, servers, software, hardware, and RFID technology. Software drove most of the added expense. The budget also includes another $250,000 for RFID wristbands in the coming year.





Source: Laurie Sullivan at TechWeb.com, quoted in Information Week




Alton Towers visitors set for RFID ride


Alton Towers is introducing a radio frequency identification (RFID) system to allow visitors to have their day at the theme park recorded on personalised souvenir DVDs. The 'YourDay in the Park' video-capture system will use RFID bracelets to identify wearers, who will be captured on cameras stationed at key rides and attractions around the site. The video clips will be routed, catalogued and digitally stored in DVD format, for customers to retrieve later in the day. The DVDs will contain up to 30 minutes of stock and personalised footage.
YourDay Video Technologies is working with Venue Solutions and Sony Professional Solutions Europe to create the system, which will come into use at Alton Towers in April 2007.


Andy Davies, commercial services director at Alton Towers, says initial research suggests take-up will be high.

‘We will have 80 to 100 cameras in the first instance to help capture and compile a record of a visitor’s day,’ he said.
‘Eighty-four per cent of visitors we asked had a positive impression of the service.’

Davies believes visitors will not be overly concerned about the invasion of privacy implications of wearing the bracelets.

‘We will not force the bracelets onto people and the cameras will be unobtrusive, so they will not feel like they are being watched,’ he said.

Davies is confident that the system will be able to cope with high demand.

‘At peak times the park has up to 30,000 visitors every day. We won’t achieve 100 per cent take-up of the bracelets, but the system will be capable of high volumes of processing.

‘It will be able to compile and burn a DVD in minutes, so visitors can pick them up when they leave,’ he said.

Technology requirements will be defined over the next three months. How the bracelets will be given out is not yet decided.

‘A big challenge is distributing the bracelets,’ said Davies. ‘We will look at the cost of giving out thousands of bracelets weighed up against making sure people are aware of the service.’

The Sony video cameras will also be used for security purposes, to help tackle vandalism and prevent break-ins.


Source: Lisa Kelly, Computing