In an extremely competitive hospitality industry worth $570b in 2017, hotels spend vast amounts of time and money trying to know their customer, provide them with great experience, protect their security and safeguard their privacy. Still, after providing very sensitive personal information, a guest coming for the tenth time after a long tiring journey will still be treated as an unknown customer, be kindly asked to wait in long lines to check-in or have breakfast and offered upselling or ancillary of no interest to her. Moreover, access cards are not practical, can be passed to unauthorized people, and hotels’ legal duty of keeping accurate, trustable and auditable records of the identity of their guests still rely on untrained staff to check their guests’ documents and identities. This poses security threats and gives a false sense of security to society.
Kickstarted in 2019 by entrepreneurial individuals who have put their combined experience to work, YooniK is set to deliver the next big global tech disruption: Biometrics in Things(TM). Starting in the hospitality industry, we believe to be on a glazing path to become the de facto standard of a trusted Hospitality Identity, providing immersive and seamless guest experiences which are truly unique. YooniK allows guests to interact on- the-move with intelligent IoT devices to prove who they are and acquire services or be granted access. BiTTM technology can be embedded and made ubiquitous in essentially any environment. Whether you want to seamlessly check into a hotel room and access the buffet breakfast lounge, pay for goods with a loyalty card, pick up your medicines at the pharmacy or enter your rental car: just face the camera and go! Powered by a strong belief in data privacy, we have additionally put very hard work into a novel proprietary Privacy with BenefitsTM technology which goes well-beyond GDPR to ensure privacy by design while keeping all the tailored and contextualized benefits one may have from sharing data.
Backed up by an innovation partnership with Intel and recognized by major international hospitality players representing 1% of the hotel rooms available in the world, our company is setting the ground for integrating the YooniK technology in field trials with a trusted core of world-renowned innovation hospitality partners and disrupting the market with a world-premiere roll-out to operational scenarios in thousands of rooms by the end of 2020. Don’t you want to check into a YooniK hotel already?
The goals of this feasibility study were to: (1) analyze the market of biometrics in hospitality in depth, (2) refine the YooniK product concept and business model, (3) deploy an MVP in field trials in hotel chains in order to validate the YooniK concept as well as the associated business innovation opportunity. Furthermore, we expected to (4) showcase the obtained results in dedicated industry forums side by side with industry experts, academic experts and hi-tech providers and (5) setup a YooniK Think Tank as an Advisory Board of the project.
