Info 202 Fall 2011

Hotels have been having problems with disappearing cloth items for years. People stay at the hotel and believe that their experience at a luxury hotel was so amazing that they need to take a piece of it home to remember their experience. 

Well, right now you are better off taking a picture.

LinenTracker was developed by Fluensee to help better keep track of hotel linens. The LinenTracker system embeds washable RFID chips into hotel towels, bathrobes, and even bedsheets to track their whereabouts at an unprecedented level. Location data of hotel linens is collected at several areas: from the laundry room, in storage, during check-in/check-out, and, most importantly, while customers are using them in their rooms and throughout the hotel premises. The data is aggregated in real time and organized in Fluensee's tracking software to provide detailed analytics and insights on the fate of the hotels linens. Now the hotels will find out who really are stealing their towels: the customers or their suppliers!

Besides discouraging potential thieves, there are several other benefits of LinenTracker: some include better resource management and improved availability assurance (I bet people on the beach don't have to worry about the hotel running out of towels!). The RFID chip embedded into the hotel linens in combination with scanning equipment generate the digital metadata that makes tracking possible. I can't want to see someone check out of a hotel and right outside the door a loud alarm starts ringing uncontrollably. It's just a matter of time when that video is uploaded to YouTube.

Here's the original article: http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/smart-takes/washable-rfid-tags-track-hotel-towels-sheets-robes/15530