There has got to be a way to penalize companies for attempting this kind of thing. Even just removing the charge without discussion isn't enough, as some people will be traveling on a corporate card they don't necessarily monitor closely, will confuse the charge for something else etc.
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.
The big problem is the power imbalance. There's a reason they start your stay by putting a hold on a credit card. And even if you could charge them, they can afford a legal battle better than you.
Oh, that's a common misunderstanding, but they can't sue me in court – by accepting me as a customer, they accepted my binding arbitration agreement! It clearly said so on my luggage tag their authorized agent (i.e. the bellboy) handled as part of check-in.
>Oh, that's a common misunderstanding, but they can't sue me in court – by accepting me as a customer, they accepted my binding arbitration agreement! It clearly said so on my luggage tag their authorized agent (i.e. the bellboy) handled as part of check-in.
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?
> Why can't there be a human membership union that sets these automatic binding arbitration agreements on service providers on behalf of members?
Those already exist, we call those things 'governments'.
I think we got some wires crossed somewhere, my government is helping them beat me up more ...
That's because another group of people made a pact with the devil, and a third group just shrugged their shoulders when everyone had a chance to nullify that pact....
It takes constant vigilance to prevent that union from being captured by management.
Assuming you live in a democracy (we'll see if America still counts in 3 years), elect a better one.
Thankfully America is not a democracy, and never was.
Yes it is. “Democracy” from the Greek: “common people rule” and “Republic” from the Latin: “the thing, public.”
Republic and democracy mean the same damn thing, rule by the people as opposed to rule by a monarch.
In what way is this country ruled by the people? You're periodically given a non-choice between two options that have equal disdain for your actual concerns, who then go on to play games to see who can get the most bajiliionare backing for reelection, and if you don't like what they're doing you're perfectly free to vote for the OTHER jerk who also doesn't give a shit about you.
This is oligarchy. The 'democratic' process is a smokescreen, and an increasingly thin one.
Look up 'liquid democracy'. It's the best example of what an actual democracy might look like if we did it. We won't, but I also enjoy Blade Runner and Star Trek, so there's no harm in fiction.
Oh, god, this tired nonsense. Yes, obviously, it's ruled by the people. We have parties, we vote, anyone can run for office. Anyone can vote third party, and they occasionally even win. That your neighbors don't share your views does not make it undemocratic. It's not perfect, but it's democratic.
It's like people can no longer imagine living under a totalitarian state... where you don't even get a vote, and if you don't like what's happening and you say something about it, you're shot. That's literally the way things were done before democracies and republics existed... it's still the way things are done in places like North Korea.
So we ought to be thankful we're not in NK. Got it. Glad your bar is so high. It's apparent that you're decided but other folks will read this so let's break it down barney style.
The 'third parties' argument is a painful joke, statistically speaking [0 1 2]. You can make all sorts of arguments as to why but the fact is that without support from D or R you can go get fucked.
This raises the question - are there only two opinions? With the obvious answer - of course not. We could say 'well, maybe people fall generally into two camps', but that doesn't really pass muster either, does it? I have friends on both sides of the aisle and I agree with all of them on some things. This is evidenced by the amount of voters registered third party despite the abysmal election numbers [3].
So what's going on here? Well, people are being strategic. We're on first-past-the-post in most places. This means you're typically voting not for what you want but for what you don't want. That is not a system of representation, it's a sports game where the prize is some cosmetic social program changes and not much else.
Mamdani is an excellent example of what this system does to third party candidates. As soon as there's a legitimate threat to the entrenched parties, fundraising spikes massively for the opposition [4].
Not getting a vote under this system wouldn't be more totalitarian, it would be more honest.
0 -https://pressgallery.house.gov/member-data/party-breakdown
1 - https://www.senate.gov/senators/SenatorsRepresentingThirdorM...
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_and_independent_me...
3 - https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-voters-have-a-party-a...
4 - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/nyregion/mamdani-adams-do...
> totalitarian state... where you don't even get a vote
Quick note that totalitarian states often have elections in which the population is allowed to vote.
This is exactly the kind of subversive stuff I live for.
Live for?
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"
I wonder if there's a business model for a "robo-lawyer" paired with a travel agency here: "Stay at one of these hotels using this credit card issued by us, sign this contract promising that you won't smoke there, and if the hotel tries anything funny, we'll reward you with the room rate back and a bonus" :)
The company that issues cards to be provided to phone phishers understands this perfectly :)
Can’t you do a charge back? Isn’t this a key kind of protection that credit cards give you?
Only if you want to get banned from ever staying in a hotel again
Hopefully hotels don't yet have an industry-wide "do not host" list without any appeal process...?
> Hopefully hotels don't yet have an industry-wide "do not host" list without any appeal process...?
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.
Hyatt and Marriott share their info with everybody every few years when they get hacked
Are chargebacks useless now since they usually lead to being banned from that provider/vendor? Do a chargeback for a scammy App Store app, get your 1k smartphone bricked and your emails locked out?
It's always been the case that if you refuse to pay a bill the other party can refuse to do service with you.
Obviously charging back Hyatt won't get you banned from Hilton. And the response question would be: Why would you returned to a hotel chain that scammed you?
Because that's where you job books when you travel?
Then that sounds like the employers problem, though. Hopefully they audit their expense accounts for stunts like that.
So they check the bill and see that you incurred a $500 fine for smoking in the room they paid for? How does this help :(
"A hotel" ? Unlikely.
what power imbalance?
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
Do hotels in the US not allow you to pay with cash any more? What if you don't have an internationally accepted card?
I worked at a small hotel during college. A couple of girls wanted to rent a room, but they didn't have a credit card. We didn't rent rooms without credit cards, but I made an exception. They paid for the room in cash and provided a small deposit. The girls were so sweet, how could anything go wrong? Well, they threw a party and completely trashed the room. Lots of damage. The police eventually showed up, but the girls were gone. The ID they provided turned out to be a fugazi. They played me.
It feels like if nobody proactively creates a privacy-preserving solution, exploitable ones arise into the vacuum. Or, as a more-depressing thought, they win out anyway.
At least the bottom quarter of the American population in terms of virtue would run away in situations like that. There are a lot of scoundrels.
Maybe even more… so what kind of cash based solution could there be? (that’s not physically preventing them from ever travelling)
30 years ago it was possible to check into a good US hotel with cash under an assumed name. That is pretty much impossible now; they want to see your ID and a credit card.
It might still be possible to pay cash in fleabag hotels; I don't know.
Try 60 years ago. I'm not sure when the change happened but 30 years ago cards were required. In 60+ year old books it is common for the 'dective' to look in the hotel book and find a false name.
That was not my experience 30 years ago.
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.
Generally speaking, no. Most major hotel chains require a credit card.
Credit card is a proxy for an acceptable credit score. It's a filter so they can exclude irresponsible people without exposing themselves to claims of discrimination or racism.
Unfortunately people who simply choose to live without using credit are caught up in that too.
In Europe, UK and Ireland it’s not an actual credit card - a debit card is perfectly acceptable and normal.
I’ve seen some hotels actually take out an authorization hold for the deposit. That can be done on debit and credit cards.
I believe many US hotels won't let you check in without at least a debit card these days.
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.
I've stayed at a hotel in UAE that took a deposit that they returned on check out. They were perfectly fine with it in cash.
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.
You either need a card + ID, or a ~$300 cash deposit and ID.
You can pay with cash. You usually can't stay without a credit card. Even debit often doesn't suffice.
Is this a US thing? I stay at hotels from time to time across Europe, and I always pay a fixed price either when booking or at arrival for the whole stay. Never had to enter credit card information anywhere, and I never would precisely for this reason. I put my credit card information once when booking a car at an airport and was scammed with random scratches being found at return. Can't imagine ever going through that again. One of the worst and most infuriating money exchange experiences in my life.
No, it's a common practice in most western countries and can confirm for you a list of a dozen or more hotels ranging from $100/night to $1000/night that do this in countries ranging from Ireland to France to Japan. It's really no big deal and is extremely common. In fact, France as I discovered does this at the gas stations where they put $200 or so authorizations on your card for absolutely no good reason.
There are various scenarios but I think the one you are thinking of is you show up to the hotel, hand them your cash, and pay at the desk. Often times, though I have not been in a hotel that will not ask for a card, they ask you for a credit card and put an authorization on there in case you smoke in the room, or maybe turn it into spaghetti or any other random incidentals.
An authorization is basically the hotel telling the credit card that they're "reserving space" so to speak on your credit limit on the card.
Regarding your rental car experience, that's a common scam and again moreso seen in Europe, but not really anything to do with the method of payment. They would have just mailed you a bill for the damages instead. I guess you could ignore it.
> France as I discovered does this at the gas stations where they put $200 or so authorizations on your card for absolutely no good reason.
It's the same here but I'm not sure how it could work another way? They have to make sure you have the money to pay for the fuel you're pumping, it doesn't seem weird to me.
I can't imagine a pump that allows you to pump as you wish and then just begs you to pay. That works for the manned stations with low traffic only.
That’s how it works if I choose “pay at cashier” - if I walk up and don’t have the money the fuel is already in my car.
No, it's not. I just checked into 6 hotels across 5 countries in both Eastern and Western Europe last month, and every single one needed a tapped physical credit card for a deposit on top of my pre-paid booking (sometimes via booking.com, sometimes direct with the hotel).
I can't remember ever NOT having to leave a CC for a deposit in any hotel I've ever stayed at in any country in my life. I'm sure it's happened, but it sure isn't remarkable when they DO require a card.
I stopped using Airbnb because of the ridiculous "cleaning" fees and happily went back to hotels. But what Hyatt did in the US is shameful. The government should investigate, and the CEO should probably step down.
Seems like a candidate for class action lawsuits against the hotel, the brand, and the sensor company?
Class action lawsuits are a boon for corpos. They take what should be many separate instances of fraud with unknown unknowns and tie them all off in one small garbage bag. Half the money goes to the attorneys and the other half is a token payment or even just funds a coupon to encourage doing more business with the perpetrator.
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.
There was a big thing about this a few years ago -- companies didn't want class actions (too expensive in lawyers, primarily), so they forced binding arbitration agreements into their EULA. Then a big law firm filed thousands of binding arbitrations on behalf of what was basically the class. The company had to pay $1000's/arbitration in fees to the arbitration company, which also didn't have an incentive to reduce the number of arbitrations when the company tried to get out of it. Turned into an incentive to not put binding arbitration clauses in agreements...
Was it necessary to make your point in a very snarky manner?
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, I edited it out. You were right, and I figured it better for the conversation to just not start off with that phrasing. Sorry for not seeing a way to make that apparent while also not growing accidental complexity.
They're a boom compared the the impossible ideal world where every instance is prosecuted separately, but barring the superhuman feat of getting thousands of individuals to show up to court, they are certainly far worse for corporations than any realistic alternate scenario.
One alternative is having consumer protection laws with teeth and state-sponsored consumer protection agencies pursuing lawsuits to enforce their boundaries. It works fairly well that way in some European countries.
One alternative scenario is for courts to start recognizing administrative runaround as actual damages. It sounds like there is a lot of back and forth to correct these fraudulent bills, so estimating maybe 4 days of 4 hours of paralegal-equivalent time ~ $1600. But then additional legal fees on top of that for having to press the matter, so ~$5000? Whereas a class action lawsuit would net like maybe $20 token payment to victims, so $40 cost to company. So perhaps only 1 out of 100 people who were wronged would have to actually sue to make it just as bad for the corpo. Never mind getting into things like treble damages as these corpos are deliberately committing these frauds.
good luck with that lol
> put the burden of proof that everything was fine on them.
as if they need more incentives to surveil everything
Yes it's called a lawsuit for defrauding consumers. Hopefully someone actually does it though
I'm sure the hotel will blame the company that sold them the sensors, and the company that built them will blame some developer who changed the sensitivity value from 6 to 8. Everyone will act shocked, the developer will get fired, and the new revenue stream will be called "customers who visited adult websites on a shared private network." I doubt that will end up on TikTok :)
Yeah, it’s called regulation and consumer protection.
> There has got to be a way to penalize companies for attempting this kind of thing
Yes, don't go to them.
Love,
Canada
There is a way. Don’t give them any of your money.
So now the debt they claim you owe is partially valid...
(Yes, I'm being obtuse. In response to a simplistically obtuse point)
It's called the criminal justice system, specifically the longstanding laws against fraud. But it requires effective government to implement, and government has been becoming ever less effective at such things (it tends to give corpos a pass based on diffusing responsibility rather than properly charging everyone involved with criminal conspiracy)
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.
It reminds me of a hotel I stayed at that had a stocked mini-fridge. Removing any item from the fridge resulted in an automatic, silent charge. Putting it back did not remove the charge. So if you simply took something out to check it in, or if you wanted to chill your own beverage, they counted that as consuming the item.
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.
I was at a hotel recently with packaged snacks on a tray, cookies crackers etc. There was a sign clearly explaining that moving anything off the tray results in an automatic charge. Thank god we didn’t have the kids with us.
This kind of thing is so penny smart, pound foolish. If I ever see that sign, it's immediately going on my Instagram, telling everyone I know to never stay at such a place.
I'm still never staying at AirBnB's when it actually matters because they completely screwed over my gf when she booked a bachelorette party and the owner literally sold the property without cancelling the reservation and the new owner rebooked the same site, also using AirBnB. AirBnB just offered a refund, even though the monetary damages were easily 10x the cost of the reservation and obviously permanent in the fact that in ruined a major life event.
Say what you want about the amount of money your company will make. Reputations take a lifetime to build, and most people have a grim trigger when it comes to being screwed over.
I am amazed that hotels are still stuck in this old mindset of charging exorbitant amounts to some customers (unpleasant to customers) rather than providing a good service to all customers (good for customers).
If I knew that a hotel chain will have my room fridge stocked with beer at reasonable prices (small markup or even no markup, because this does not need to be a revenue stream!), I would pick that hotel every time. Just for the convenience, and the nice feeling of not walking a minefield.
Got billed (via corporate) for this because I put my own coke in a beer can slot and found myself in an interview with HR about it later, very strict no alcohol policy on company expenses. At the time I was tea total.
> tea total.
If it was totally tea, why were you drinking coke?
teetotal.
Most hotels that have this will tell you this at check in. That’s the refrigerator is the mini bar/snack bar and don’t use it for personal items.
What they don't tell you is that you can request/demand a second fridge for medical reasons and don't have to explain any further. Take that for what you want.
That's pretty standard in American hotels these days though. You don't touch anything you don't intend to pay for. It's to prevent people from drinking the booze and refilling it with water.
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.
Some hotels let you call and request for the items to be removed, to avoid trouble at check out.
Those things should just be illegal. I can't even imagine how much energy and plastic/paper/food goes to waste in those damn things.
An entire hotel probably wastes less from the mini fridge specifically than a family of 4 for a year.
It's in the ballpark if you include all energy source for the family.
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.
Seems like this is standard for every hotel in Vegas.
Synopsis and excerpt:
[Rest] markets itself as a way to "unlock a new revenue stream"
with the help of a "robust algorithm" for detecting smoking.
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.
> The awesome thing about black-box algorithms is they can't be challenged when they're wrong
I want to call this "responsibility laundering". You get money, but wash away any responsibility, thus cleaning it.
The more stuff is managed by algorithms, the more it’ll become important that there is a legal right to challenge them and even hold those who adopt or implement them some kind of accountable.
For now, we have to rely on the social algorithm of 'reputation'
the more it’ll become important that there is a legal right to challenge them
There’s a great book about this called The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies.
"We didn't know our vendor would do so badly." wink wink nudge nudge
Sure they can. Sounds like a class action too.
"unlocking revenue stream" is wild way to say theft
I bet it’s also a rev share model. Hotel doesn’t pay for the device but revenue is shared. Like the traffic cameras where they shorten yellow light to durations that a car is incapable of stopping in time.
Check the App Store screenshots - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rest-by-noiseaware/id644925142...
The app even tracks the whole fee amount in-app being collected. "Net charge", "adjusted charge amount" reasons of "guest complaint"...
Their "NoiseAware" main product line also sounds incredibly dystopian. Apparently, that's a "privacy-safe" microphone listening in rental properties, to "detect crowds gathering"...!?
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.
AirBnB partiers are a real problem, I live in a tourist destination and regularly hear horror stories about a residential neighborhood suddenly having crowds descend on a house that's become a party rental. There's nobody to notice it getting out of hand and tell them to chill before the neighbors call the cops because the owner is a holding company on the other side of the country.
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.
I think repeatedly calling the police is the correct way to handle an AirBnB party house in your neighborhood. I don't want to instead have the unpaid job of monitoring the guests for the absentee owner and be responsible for telling them to chill.
Of course, a long term neighbor it is different. There the police would be a last resort.
Then don't rent your house. This is a risk of rental properties.
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.
This is just pushing the externalities to the residents. It takes several months for airbnbs to get banned, and it's tough for smaller cities to get the bans enforced.
There must be a better answer than "pass a law so the american multinational does a better job at regulating its rentals"
Feels like a fun opportunity for a jurisdiction to legislate and pursue eminent domain seizures of "party homes" with absentee landlords.
> AirBnB partiers are a real problem,
They are, which is why residential properties that are used as hotels should be seized and auctioned off.
> Of course Airbnbs are also a real problem in general with the way they increase the scarcity of housing,
What's the actual mechanism for airbnbs to prevent housing construction?
That reminds me - we're staying in an Airbnb later this summer and I've been meaning to research gadgets to detect hidden cameras. Now I guess I need to look out for microphones too. We're going in quite the dystopian direction.
I suppose in theory you could have a device which doesn't have the storage or bandwidth to record/transmit full audio, but does some heuristics on the device and then transmits a small payload of flags. But in any case I wouldn't want to stay anywhere with an unaccountable black box ready to unfalsifiably charge 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
A decibel reader isn’t a microphone that records, necessarily. Being obnoxiously loud is a societal ill and I applaud efforts to reduce this.
No one wants to live next to an Airbnb house blasting music at 3am.
Sure, but I’ll certainly not stay at a place putting me under privacy-invading surveillance on the suspicion that I don’t know basic etiquette.
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.
So aside from Rest being incompetent morons ("temperature changes" from smoking??), they now also have incentive to make it trigger as much as possible.
> incentive
it's not an incentive, it's a raison d'etre!
So now when I play a game on my laptop, I get charged too??
(People were mentioning hair dryers)
Primitive contract asset tokenization. What other parts of the hotel-customer contract could become zero-capex financial instruments powered by ambiguous surveillance data, washed in health and safety?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_tokenization
Asset tokenization refers to the process of converting rights to a real-world asset into a digital token on a blockchain or distributed ledger. These tokens represent ownership, rights, or claims on tangible or intangible assets and can be traded or transferred on digital platforms.
> 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.”
What's messed up about red light cameras is they can actually be useful - if used correctly!
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).
The only experimentation that you need to to is extend the damn yellow lights. Long enough duration of yellow lights reduces accidents to nearly zero. This has been proven over and over 1000x. The data has been out there for 40+ years. There's zero need for red light cameras.
> Like the traffic cameras where they shorten yellow light to durations that a car is incapable of stopping in time.
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.
Hello from Chicago!
Yet when you try to impose legislation regulating black-box algorithms, suddenly it's among the HN crowd the Big Bad EU choking businesses and stifling progress, vid the recent AI agreement discussion.
They're disrupting the scam market by creating new and innovative ways to scam customers out of their money.
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!
This escalated with the Mag 7 and surveillance capitalism. Now everyone wants to do it. Good for margins!
> 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.
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.
You're not wrong. A single class action lawsuit would destroy Rest as a going concern, assuming there were enough false-positives generated to be an issue.
(Rest would have to demonstrate how its technology works in court in order to have any hope of defeating such a lawsuit. And as the hotel guests don't have contracts with Rest, they aren't bound by any arbitration agreements.)
Hotel guests are not buying the sensors. The hotels would probably have a claim due to this, but since they're "unlocking new revenue streams", they are probably not going to bother.
I scoured their website to look for any clues about how it might (allegedly) work and got a fat lot of nothing.
> 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.
Given that this image: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/653a9fbd1075088b6c8f8bd3/... shows PM2.5 and CO2(ppm) it may imply they monitor particles and CO2 levels. My guess is it also monitors humidity, and temperature. Humidity helps distinguish smoke from water vapor (eg. steaming shower).
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.
Note that pm2.5 will also spike when you've used shampoo, perfume, deoderant, lotion, sunblock; if you use dryer sheets and you unpack your clothes, etc.
Exactly! So many ways to make PM2.5 spike. I didn't even know about shampoo and sunblock. I assume for sunblock it's the spray kind?
This is news to me, but I’m unsurprised. Why people use so much strongly scented products is absolutely baffling to me.
Farts will cause it to spike
I wonder if you could set it off by farting too much: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvB0wRFebus
That's awesome for the hotel! The less they dust their rooms, the more "smoking fees" they can charge guests.
It's going to be similar bullshit to what Halo uses in the highschool vape sensors. A bunch of particulate sensors for like PM1, PM2.5, PM10, sniffing out VOCs, and then they consider any tripping of any of that to be a "smoke" sesh.
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.
Yeah the anecdotal evidence leads you to this as well - the hair drier usage leading to triggering the sensor. My PM/VoC sensors in my bedroom spike when my wife dries her hair while my CO/CO2 sensors do not.
This is like those 10k bomb detectors that were just a box with wires dangling out aren’t they?
I do not understand what possesses people to buy this stuff without proof.
Because they can charge $500 to almost all occupants realizing the likelihood of a repeat visitor is low?
> Our sophisticated smoking detection algorithm has been tested
Okay, but what were the results? https://xkcd.com/1096/
> 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.
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.
Watch it turns out you can tune the FP rate like how casinos can set the win rate on slot machines.
Trading the long term reputation of your company for short term profits. What could go wrong?
Nothing, it worked and keeps working for most of the companies, especially if they have sufficient market share and ability to prevent competition.
For every bad review, they post ten fake good ones.
Nothing, it's a problem for future leaders. This is how modern economy works.
Is there a way to deactivate the sensor if you find one in your room?
Tape a Tupperware container over it like every college student does in their dorm.
That could open a whole world of legal punishment for you far surpassing a small fee on your bill. Fire safety laws and such.
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.
Fire sensors and alarm centrals are very regulated business. This shit won't pass for one.
I assume if it’s triggering on car exhaust or something from opening room windows
I would assume it was triggered by insects crossing the sensor. Optical smoke detectors are common in hotels.
Hair dryers are mentioned several times, so I would assume one of the things these sensors look for is a rise in the air temperature.
You would need a pretty good sensor to detect a temperature increase from lighting a cigarette. Most likely, the hair dryer has a hair stuck that gets burnt once turned on
Or perhaps formaldehyde release from hair spray and other chemicals partly due to the heat of the hair dryer, but also released because of the agitation and wind.
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.)
Hair dryers set off particulate sensors when used to dry hair. The air purifier in my upstairs office goes crazy when my wife blowdries her hair in the bathroom across the hall.
Windows at these kinds of hotels usually do not open at all.
This hotel is a 2-3 story building, with sliding windows, and some balconies. There is opportunity for outside air to blow into the room.
Actually when an algorithm results in something false, then you do not have to challange it, it is just simply wrong.
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.
Does Hyatt corporate have any say in this? Pretty sure many hotels are licensing the name, independent managed, etc.
Ie you’re just as likely to find these at an other brand hotels too.
From their FAQ:
"Is it worth the investment?
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.
Is there that much smoking in hotels? Do they charge more for smoking rooms?
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.
The last time I walked into a hotel room that smelled like cigarette smoke was in 1998, so I would think this is very uncommon.
Using an ozone generator you can remove all odors in a medium sized room in less than 30min. Only poorly organized cleaning staff would have this issue.
I thought it was a little tougher than that? I know it costs at least a few hundred bucks and takes a day or two to ozone a small apartment, which would roughly line up with the $500 fine this hotel charges.
An ozone generator itself doesn't cost much and the only recurring cost is the power it draws, which is also low (dozens of watts).
Which makes me ask why we even need smoking fees then?
I had one in 2022. I immediately asked for a different room.
I can't recall the last time. Smoking in the US is way, way down. Not gone, to be sure, but it was crashing even before vapes.
In particular, it’s way, way down among the cohort of the population that have lifestyles amenable to staying in hotel rooms.
Truck drivers and lots of trades crews (e.g. linesmen) stay in hotels all the time. But typically they are not staying at the Hyatt.
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 chatted with a motel owner in the middle of nowhere, Arizona who made his yearly nut off seasonal melon pickers, usually Mexican nationals on agricultural work visas. They need a place to stay, too. Otherwise, he had the kind of quiet, far out of the way old motel you see in horror movies (which I particularly love) and the odd foreign film set in America.
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.
When you just need a shower and a bed there's nothing wrong with the old roadside motel, the kind where each room opens directly to the outside and you park right in front of the door. Mostly long gone, though a few remain here and there.
I wouldn't be so quick to say that. Depends on the pricepoint of the hotel, the cohort with lifestyles amenable to staying in hotel rooms varies from business travel to escorts and drug dealers.
Last time this happened for me was 2024. Note to self, don’t buy the cheapest hotel possible. It will smell like a blunt wrap.
I can't imagine people getting charged by this system not doing chargebacks.
A number like 84x implies that it's almost entirely false positives.
It doesn’t imply that. I’m pretty sure it is all false positives, but that number does not imply that. It could simply be that only ~1 in 84 smokers was being fined before
A large number of false positives would likely show up as a deluge of negative reviews. "They charged me $500 and I've never smoked in my life". Surely some of those would be lies, and you'd have to dig them out from the existing pile of petty grievances that result in bad reviews. But I suspect it would still be pretty clear if there were that many false positives.
No, this is a statistics trope. “Our revenue has grown 50x this year” always means “our revenue was <something laughable like $100> and now it’s <something still laughable like $5000>”
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.
Drug companies do it all the time. They market something as providing a "50% reduction" in some metric and in the fine print you find it's a change from 0.5% to 0.25% in occurrence.
50% reduction in death rate sounds impressive until you find out it’s 3 out of 8 billion people, true.
No... it could be false positives, it could also be that almost no one (~1%) of smokers were caught before and this is actually a miracle technology that detects smoking.
Frankly it tracks that almost no one was caught before.
> 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.
They might be trying to indirectly generate revenue from legal marijuana.
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.
Eh, just because most people don't report most rule violations... And on the flip side most organizations don't really encourage their employees to report rule violations.
Hotel cleaning staff could be an exception, I don't know, it would strike me as a mildly but not hugely surprising one.
The hotels don't ever catch people in the act, they just let housekeeping report that the room smells like smoke and they take the fine out of your deposit.
That's why they demand a deposit (or a card), by the way.
Leave a $20 for the housekeeper and you won't get reported.
If I got one of these I'd pay it and never, ever, ever stay at any hotel owned by the entity again. Being that I spend $25k-50k a year on hotels, their loss is a small hotel's gain.
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.
The hotel chain probably had no input into the decision to add this. Hyatt is just a franchise for many hotels. Call up /email the chain's corporate folks and tell them about the charge and that you'll not stay in their chain of hotels unless they can guarantee the devices are banned from the franchise. If you really spend that much on hotels every year your demand would at least raise some eyebrows.
It's not myopia. The hotel owner only owns one or two locations. They damage the national brand but they make more money for themselves. As long as new people loyal to Hyatt keep coming to their location, they are fine.
Of course, that's why Hyatt imposes standards on their hotels to keep the name.
And those standards always need updating to keep up with social norms, new technologies, consumer expectations, et cetera. Hence my recommendation to start by communicating with Hyatt or whatever franchise.
It’s tricky because the chains (like “Hyatt”) don’t actually own any hotels. They are generally owned by local ownership groups and it can be hard to figure out the real owner.
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.
That's a cop out. What's the point of a brand if quality control is all over the place?
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.
> What's the point of a brand if quality control is all over the place?
Extracting rents comes in all shapes and sizes.
But in that case brand association is an empty signal. As a paying customer, I can't meaningfully infer anything from it, and would thus best disregard it entirely.
They lock you in mostly with loyalty incentives vs brand recognition. Ask any of your friends who travels for work frequently where they stay and why. The answer always has to do with the points on offer not the experience which is more or less the same across most hotels and pricepoints until you reach a very very high pricepoint.
I agree that Hyatt needs to take some responsibility, but not all franchises are equal, e.g. prior to inflation it was ~1-2M USD investment average to startup a McDonalds, you still must follow their rules, and it’s not hands-off.
This isnt exactly true. They do not own the property but their contracts give them full ownership over policies and processes of the location. It's an essential part of their brand by the way, to assure continuity.
If Hyatt is providing its name for a fee, then Hyatt indeed has responsibility for this incident
> Without brand loyalty, hotels suffer.
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.
This is what actually kills brands. The funny thing is our collective memory is short, so a brand killed by poor product and bad decisions is often revitalized by PE a few years later, because of brand recognition.
Actually I think the public tends to generalize their complaints/injuries and act in the most spiteful ways that are available to them. For example, decades of bad experiences at the DMV translates into cries that we should defund the post-office, NSF, etc, no matter how irrational that is.
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.
The only reason any businesses using tricks can get away with it, for any significant time, is because their customers rather pay less and endure some tricks than pay more to the honest upright folks elsewhere.
So it’s the customers themselves intentionally seeking out less than completely honest businesses to spend their money at because it’s X% cheaper.
Hyatt is typically considered an above average chain but I don’t think any HN reader would have thought them to be 100% honest and straightforward in 100% of locations.
Often I wonder if some scammers (and this is totally a scam) basically pay a premium to feel like they've outsmarted people, or for the smirking satisfaction that their victims can't do anything about it. Some scams are so much work for so little gain, or so obviously counterproductive in anything but the short term, that it seems like that.
No, it's just stupidity and myopia. Like those screens that replaced glass beverage cases in liquor stores a few years ago. Not one customer liked them. Not one customer wanted them and the results were beyond terrible. People literally stopped buying. But people actually invested millions into that company and other people actually bought their products and thought "gee this is great". Imagine how disconnected you have to be from your customers to make such an investment and/or installation for a few bucks? Stupid is as stupid does...
I seem to recall hearing that there was a person high up in the management of at least one of the store chains that did this who had a ton of financial interest in the company that made those door-screens.
Whenever some decision doesn't make sense, you can count on corruption (self-dealing, nepotism, kick-backs, or plain old embezzlement).
Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by grift.
Maybe I don't go to liquor stores often enough but I can't imagine what you are talking about.
LOL! I'd never seen those, either. Must not be a priority in my region, or I haven't been to a Walgreens recently. But, here's the reason:
> 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.
LOL. Screens as in video. I was imagining wire mesh. I guess that shows my age.
But no, I have not seen the coolers with video screens for doors anywhere around here either.
> Like those screens that replaced glass beverage cases in liquor stores a few years ago.
The what now?
For what it's worth, when I run into trash like that, I just open the door(s) and eave/prop them open while I browse. The entire point of having glass was so that people could browse without having to open the door, but apparently that doesn't matter to them any more.
I wonder if the company making the detectors, pitched them on a free install.
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.
Sounds similar to the red light traffic camera revenue sharing scam. Free or discounted install and then revenue share. Both the supplier and location owner have every incentive to trigger false positives to make more money. In both cases this 'business model' is exploiting asymmetry in power dynamics.
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.
> I asked Erik if the room needed to be cleaned [...] And he said it wasn't needing special cleaning so he offered me $250
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
Wait, woodbine? A hotel literally owned by/named after a cigarette brand? You literally couldn’t make this up.
Largely a property development company, named after a geological feature "Woodbine Sand", in Texas
[1] https://woodbinedevelopment.com/woodbinedevelopment.com/our-...
While we're on that topic of "things that aren't actually named after cigarettes": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlboro_(disambiguation)
https://www.restsensor.com/ is the new name for https://noiseaware.com. They got started making a 'noisy party' sensor that is monitoring the audio in your hotel room or AirBNB. You can see the Noiseaware branding on the sensor in that X thread.
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.
Reminds me of cities shortening yellow lights to make money off of red light cameras.
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.
Markets are efficient at extracting value from things, but what that value is needs to be determined before we blindly create a market for it. In the traffic light case you mention the value is money, when it should be safety. Traffic lights are installed to ensure traffic flow and safety, so getting a monetary return on a safety device should be non-sensical, but here we are.
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.
How do you actually create aligned incentives though? Goodhard's law, cobra effects and generalized coordination problems really do seem pervasive.
I don't think it can be done without a sort of benevolent authoritarian which is sort of scary because of how much power and implicit trust is behind that. I wish we had a better signal to actually identify these people and elevate them into positions of power. They are readily identifiable in our own life ironically, I can think if plenty of people I know who I would say are trustworthy to do the right thing and not be blinded by profit. Just that for the subset of people who do want to make a buck on bad ideas saddled on top of people, incentives are very strong for them to get into influence, and there is no such mechanism to incentivize your good natured friend with no big profit seeking aspirations to that level. You need significant access to capital just to play in this league of getting elected or getting your company into the bidding process.
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.
Any efforts to veer the incentive of the market from profit towards vague things like safety or others (DEI, ESG) has been criticized and rolled so far. Can we really make the market prioritize anything other than profit?
Safety is not vague. You quantify difference before and after to determine if they are safer or not, same as if you end up with more or less money.
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.
So someone does not smoke in their room but they’re charged for cleaning anyway because a third party (Rest) told the hotel that they smoked in their room. What sort of evidence should one gather during their stay to make the strongest possible (defamation? fraud?) case against Rest? (Not that anyone wants to do that on their trip, just curious about the legal implications.)
Would it work if it were real time? You light up, and five minutes later a manager knocks.
Dunno about the legality of refusing to open the door, but it does sound like a way to get banned from a hotel chain.
Is it reasonable to make "use your body to test for carcinogens" part of the manager's job description?
Yeah, that’s totally fair. At least they’ll have testimony that the smoking was actually witnessed. Most people aren’t going to even bother fighting that since it actually happened. I just worry about abuse cases and the most obvious one here is false positives being assumed true by everyone who profits from them.
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.
The great thing about that kind of human validation is that if they get a lot of false positives, the managers will start ignoring all of the alerts.
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.
Generally you have no rights in a hotel to prevent entry.
From the thread, it sounds as if they don't even pretend this is about cleaning, they're just saying "we're a smoke-free hotel, so smoking costs $500 as a punitive measure, period".
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.
Religious freedom may come into play here. Incense and candles are a basis for many faiths so assigning a fee on people practicing their faith will cost them in court and in payouts.
Not unless the hotel is government owned or fall into a few very specific carveouts.
I'd refuse to pay the charge on check out. If they charged my card anyways I would demand a refund and inform the consumer protection agency, wait 30 days and issue the chargeback. Luckily these things work well in my nation.
AmEx used to be good about doing chargebacks generally, but they once sided with the merchant during covid when I was sold an impossible itinerary and cost me $2k.
Since then I realized that I won’t always be able to do a chargeback, and I am much more cautious with vendors.
Chase was really weird about doing a chargeback for me when a restaurant charged me a second time under a different name a month after my visit. It took several phone calls and they eventually credited my account but they would not do a chargeback. Two identical charges a month apart. I could show that I wasn't even in the same state for the second one.
Yeah the frequent advice to just do a chargeback as a consumer protection action is out of date. It is quite hard to get a bank or CC company to do one now even if you have solid evidence you're in the right. I don't really know when this changed, I guess over the last 5-8 years.
I think there are exceptions about "exigent circumstances" and COVID was considered one. My EU flight was not refunded as well despite the EU having strong protections. The airlines, at the time, were given a life-line.
I think these once in-a-decade or more events can be swallowed. But wouldn't be happy with a regular occurrence.
Which is crazy to me. I had purchased international airline tickets 9 months prior to COVID.
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
That's just credit (and for that matter most debit) cards working as designed. A card payment is only considered final once goods or services have been delivered on the agreed-upon date. For travel, this can well be months after the actual transaction date, but doesn't change anything about your dispute rights.
Unfortunately some European banks aren't too familiar with these rules, especially when bankruptcy law is involved.
Ive had good experiences with Apple doing chargebacks although my cases were pretty open and shut. Can’t say that about other issuers though including amex surprisingly
Was the flight canceled or were you not able to go due to travel restrictions?
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.
Yes they should be swallowed, but by the business/card company, not the consumer. They can decide if they want to get insured for that or not. It's ridiculous to subsidize their business risks.
GP said impossible itinerary though, not that it was unexpectedly canceled due to the pandemic.
Impossible for what reason. Sounds like the airline would be happy to adjust if things like minimum connection times changed, but the flights still ran (or maybe a minor timing change)
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.
Well the point is you can’t really refuse it. They won’t rent you the room unless you have a card on file authorized to make charges for incidentals.
the fact they have a card on file is irrelevant
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
But of course you sign a contract upon check-in that says you will pay a fee if you’re caught smoking, and they’re paying a service to make a paper trail to that effect.
> “unlock a new revenue stream”
Monetizing fire safety. Lovely.
Appears this company rebranded from NoiseAware. More tech to monitor "valued" guests...this time on noise levels
I guess there's some aspect of fire safety, because cigarettes are smoldering and can start fires. But I've been in hotel rooms where a previous occupant was smoking enough that the room smells, and it's not pleasant. It doesn't happen often now that most hotels are declared non-smoking, at least in my experience.
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.
Vape and smoke detection is not fire safety. Hotel rooms have 2-4 hour fire rated partitions (unsure on duration), typically have their own HVAC not linked to outside the room (and if there is central HVAC the supply and return ducts have fire smoke dampers), and are usually sprinkled.
It's the consequence of growth capitalism. When it's not enough to make money, you have to make more money this quarter than you did last, then it's really only a matter of time until everything is monetised under the exclusive logic of greed, devoid of any other considerations of a moral or human order. Public goods, water fountains, libraries, beaches, forests. Basic state functions. Your attention, at every moment. On it marches.
"It's the consequence of growth capitalism. When it's not enough to make money, you have to make more money this quarter than you did last, then it's really only a matter of time ..."
Agreed.
An environment of increasing interest rates exacerbates this.
The stock market grows by 10% a year. Worker income only grows 2% a year. Those aren’t sustainable.
This reminds me of Hertz new "AI" camera based damage detection... Although much less effort... This is the end. May progress have mercy on our souls.
I think both of these "innovations" will be short lived once companies recognize that reputation is still a thing, and once you build a reputation of scamming your customers, it's very hard to recover from it and the revenue from the scams isn't enough to make up for the revenue lost because nobody wants to deal with your company anymore.
People still use Hertz despite them reporting cars as stolen and having their customers arrested.
At this point if you still use Hertz you are just a dumbass straight up.
Knowing Hertz, the 360 degree camera scan still won't be proof that you didn't steal the vehicle from them
Hertz is a running joke meme on Steve Lehto's channel, an automotive Lemon Law lawyer Youtuber.
Here's a "vape detector" with more explaination.[1]
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...
It sounds ludicrous to say out loud, but if you're staying in a Hyatt hotel, it's best not to take a hot shower until this issue is resolved. The steam from the showers tend to make these types of particle sensors go wild.
The smoke detector in my previous condo used to go off all the time when I showered. Had to remove it shortly after moving in lol
Must have been placed improperly. They should not be installed in kitchens or in or near bathrooms.
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.
> They should not be installed in kitchens or in or near bathrooms.
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.
It was in the hall right outside the shower, the exhaust fan didn't work very well so I left the door open. I live in a different place now and no longer have that issue.
But the point is that machines are not particularly good at detecting smoke lol
Smoke detectors detect microparticles in the air. They typically don't or can't differentiate between steam and smoke, at least not the cheap household type detectors.
Even outdoors, humidity is a problem. Humidity turns little particles into bigger, soggier particles that give higher readings on optical sensors, which can rather inflate readings on cheap sensors in humid or foggy conditions. There’s a reason that the actual EPA particle counting standards involve drying the particles before measurement.
(RIP, EPA.)
Why would CO2 be caused by vaping? And surely the amount of CO2 caused by a cigarette is dwarfed by the amount exhaled by a person?
A person outputs about 1kg of CO2 per day, which is less than 1 gram per minute. A cigarette weighs roughly a gram, which means it probably emits roughly 3 grams of CO2... or less... (The O2 comes from the environment, and weighs 32 to carbons 12, but the cigarette isn't actually pure carbon).
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...
> A person outputs about 1kg of CO2 per day, which is less than 1 gram per minute.
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-...
You're mixing your units -- 0.05% of 6L is 3mL. In order for that to weigh 3g, atmospheric CO2 would have to be as dense as water.
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.
You're absolutely right, I apologize - I did mix units, and my thoughts collapse from there.
For what it's worth here's a NASA document using the same 1kg/day number: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20090029352/downloads/20...
I don't know where I originally got that value from, it's one that has stuck in my head for years.
This seems like outright fraud - how can they charge a cleaning fee and then perform no cleaning?
Leases often work this way. In theory it's illegal in the UK (for a home, businesses are assumed to be big boys who can negotiate on equal footing) but it's still pretty common to be charged when you move out. Specifically UK law says "reasonable wear and tear" is just an expected cost of people living in a house you let to them - so e.g. they're going to wear out carpet after some years, but a cigar burn is not OK, the walls won't look pristine but there shouldn't be graffiti, that sort of thing. They should vacuum floors but it's not reasonable to expect dust to magically vanish from every nook.
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.
They absolutely prey on people not being having the time/resources to fight back.
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.
> 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.
I'm sure you are right, but that didn't stop the landlord from trying their luck. Your observation about serving notice is on point, because in the end the deposit was returned only after my friend filed a small claims case against them.
I have no idea what “mail” is, but I’d love to see the result of the outcome when they issues a challenge at the deposit protection company.
> I have no idea what “mail” is
Not a native speaker. How do you refer to the pieces of paper that the Royal Mail sometimes drop through your letterbox?
Ironically, despite the company being called the Royal Mail, the letters it delivers are referred to as "post".
This is unlike the US Postal Service, which delivers "mail".
Interesting! Thanks.
I've received thousands of pounds back twice, by arguing my case with the Deposit Protection Scheme.
It wasn't difficult, though it helped that I'd taken lots of pictures on the day I moved out
Lost my deposit in the U.K. way back so it is not a new phenomenon. Landlords were lawyers so I figured it is not worth fighting especially from abroad.
Far better with the deposit protection. You aren’t tying to get money back from a landlord, they’re trying yo get you to agree to release some of it, it’s effectively held in escrow.
I had friends whose landlord attempted to charge them cleaning fees for an apartment that they were renovating down to the studs (and had told them that, etc. They'd been working through the complex.
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.
Always take full pictures of a unit the day you move in before any items are in, and the day you move out after cleaning. That's already saved me once when a property manager tried to do this to us.
Hah, an apartment complex I was at had me go sit in the PM's office prior to our move out inspection. "She'll be with you in a minute". Without snooping (I just caught my name on a form on her desk out of the corner of my eye), I noticed that it was my move out inspection form.
It already had remarks on it like "blinds dirty, need professional cleaning", "scuffs on drywall, needs painting", "carpet stains, need professional cleaning".
Huh.
She comes in, grabs the paperwork from her desk and says "Alright, let's do this". "Actually, I couldn't help but notice you'd already started charging me for things before we've even inspected the apartment". Cue some stammering. "Oh... uhh... that's strange. That must have already been on the form when I copied it from someone else's" (Oh, really, the printed form with my info with blue pen writing?).
And then there was the time that I needed a six month lease, but the PM company didn't want to do less than 12. I said "what it I pay the six months in full, up front, and the lease has no extension, so you know that I'll be gone and you can be planning for the next tenant in advance?". They talk to the owner, sure, that will work. I write a check for $14,000, six months rent at $2,000/mo, plus a security deposit. "That will be $18,000, actually." Huh? "We also need first and last month." Uhhh, what? It took far too long to explain to them that they were getting first, last, and the intermediary in the form of $12K. And got the distinct impression, from the stubborn inability to "comprehend" and "explain" that they thought that I wouldn't question it and just hand over another $4,000.
Just like how car rental companies can charge damage fees and not repair it (thus charging it multiple times for multiple customers!)
Time for the EU to legislate on this. Car rental companies should be required to provide a detailed report to the customer on the damage allowing the customer to challenge any potential cost estimation (with reason) that the rental car company provides. Then the rental companies should be required to prove to the customer the damage was fixed and provide the invoice.
Careful what you wish for. What you may get in one hand they'll take in another. They're pulling other crap like cleaning fees for a grain or two of sand too. Should the EU our saviour protect us against that?
Plenty alternatives to renting a car in Europe. Hit them where it hertz. Take a punt on smaller companies that are competing with eg total all inclusive insurance. Yup they're a bit more expensive sometimes but can result in an better overall experience (there are lots of scammy local companies too)
Yes, laws should generally protect consumers against predatory business practices, even if it affects the businesses' bottom line.
I'd rather be charged a bit more upfront than to see mystery charges showing up on my card after I check out or return a car in the same condition I received it.
Allowing this type of stuff to go unpunished also just hurts honest businesses and distorts the market, since in travel search aggregators, the primary sorting criterion is price.
This could all be covered under legislation. If the EU can finally get airlines to agree on hand luggage standardisation I’m fairly sure they could agree that any additional cleaning or repairs must come with receipts. This makes it a lot easier for CC disputes at that point.
Exactly my thinking. If I get this smoking charge but haven't smoked, I should be able to go to my credit card provider and tell them to get me my 500$ back
Or apartment managers charge a "cleaning fee" when it was already proven clean.
Do you know they don't do cleaning? They might bring an ozone machine into the room or something
Maybe it should be called an accelerated asset deprecation fee.
I'll probably pay 10 - 20% more for an "old school" hotel room with a clock radio and standard phone to call the front desk. No other "non-essential" electronics other than multiple well-placed power points. No TV, Coffee Machine either.
The number of bright screens on random "smart" controls that I'm trying very hard to hide before sleeping are too much.
And you will because "entrepreneurial" chains like Hyatt will lower their prices thanks to the additional revenue they get from this and other unexpected charges in order to attract more customers.
A traditional motel may be suitable, and even cheaper.
It would be cool if we had real journalism these days instead of having to find these type of reports on social media.
I bet Rest just uses a cheap voc sensor and triggers when a set threshold is hit. I doubt there's any algorithm involved.
Having played with an SGP41 (a current-gen VOC sensor), you cannot correctly do anything involving a threshold. The sensor has a couple of nasty properties, all well documented in the datasheet:
- 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.
>some sort of high pass filter
Quite some algorithm you got there!
There is a concrete algorithm, IIRC complete with pseudocode, in the datasheet. You can find open source implementations in various places. And you can have your own opinion about whether the algorithm is fit for your particular purpose.
Yep. And these things trigger from things including hairspray, nail polish remover, nail polish, microwaved food, and more. I'm constantly watching "VOCs" on a cheapo Amazon AQM change whenever I cook.
Yeah, stovetop cooking makes your VOC and particulate numbers look like a bad day on an LA freeway.
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.
if you think a 'cheap sensor' is doing much of anything without the involvement of an algorithm somewhere then might I suggest you try to use (any) cheap sensor.
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 do use them throughout the house and I didn’t have to write a single algorithm because the libraries available handle that for you. What I was meaning was they don’t have any magic sauce. The most I can see them doing is maybe est voc greater than x for y duration.
I guess you could pedantically say see that’s an algorithm! But you know what they’re heavily implying in their marketing…
It would be more profitable, and honestly probably more accurate, if the sensor was just a plastic box and then the app rolled a random number.
Probably detecting the VOC from the synthetic carpet and mattress.
Yeah, since 2023 or thereabouts all of these chips claim AI anyway.
What if the product is just a random number generator?
As a FYI: This is unreadable by me and anyone without an X account. I see the first post and that’s it.
Outrageous! We always stay, if we don't pull our travel trailer, in $100 a night hotels when on the road in the states. They will take cash for the room, but require a debit or credit card in case there's damage or fridge items usage. Neither of us smoke and always ask for a non-smoking room. To think this could happen is other worldly.
Ironic they have plenty of "hotel bad because smoke smell" and none of the "hotel bad because of fake smoke detection fine" testemonials on the site.
They also cover vaping. While smoking harms are clear and its impact on room smell is evident, the connection is pretty weak for vaping. Unless it’s a crowded bar with lots of vaping people, I can’t tell if somebody has previously used an e-cigarette or vaporized anything in a room, and generally speaking I don’t find such vapor disturbing (altough the smell can be not great).
I found that people vaping around me causes minor irritation in my eyes, and I also find the smell rather annoying, despite my sense of smell being rather weak.
I haven't noticed any long-term effects on rooms with frequent vaping though
I'm curious how various court systems would handle a person suing nearby vape users for (documented) minor irritation of eyes and airways.
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.
Not about smoking but I recently stayed at a W hotel and was woken in the middle of the night by the room lights turning on. They used electronic push buttons and I turned them off. Seconds later they turned on again. This repeated several times until I was fully awake and called the front desk.
"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.
Stayed at a Hilton owned property recently and the fan / light used a wireless controller and someone else’s room was controlling mine!
All these gadgetry.. seems like we'll need to bring an EMP blaster to hotels to "sanitize" the room..
Strange choice, fitting rooms with a novel device to annoy guests. Do you suppose it's because somebody fell out of bed and sued? And then maybe some other people thought that was a good idea, and they fell out of bed too, and now the hotels have to have the annoying thing.
I find it somewhat unlikely, as this particular W hotel was not in a country known for personal injury lawsuits.
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.
Can easily see this as another profit centre. If you paid for single occupancy and call down because the lights come on every time your partner gets up, hit ‘em with a big fine.
Stayed at a Marriott property in Germany that had these. Got up in the middle of the night to pee and the automatic lights woke up my partner.
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.
Do you take the tape off when you leave?
Yes.
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.
there was a monster under your bed...
Oh wow I ran into problems with those too. When I brought my cats to a Hilton, they would get the zoomies and run around at random in the middle of the night, which would make the lights turn on. I think I found some way to block the sensor.
Why the hell would they put occupancy sensors below the bed that trigger the overhead lights, that’s an absurd solution to people tripping and falling at night, provide a nightlight that costs $2 instead of (2) $100 occ sensor/relays.
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.
I don’t know about $2, but for $35 you can get some nice motion-sensing nightlights, e.g. https://casper.com/products/glow-nightlight
If there is a fire in the building does every single guest get a smoking fine?
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.
Tire shops do this by siping your tires and then offering you a refund if you complain that you never wanted it. But they do it without asking to everyone and then charge $60 hoping nobody notices.
Siping?
Cutting into a tire to improve traction.
Just from the description, that sounds like a case could be made for willful property damage if they did it without authorisation.
Unbelievably brazen to not bother trying to push an upsell, and just charge it without authorisation. Crazy
Oh yeah I have one of these installed at my place. Every time I walk in I hear a cha-ching from their mobile app. Another $250! It’s like free money in my pocket.
What's that famous quote? First as tragedy, and then as farce? If the British Post Office Horizon was the tragedy, this may be the farce.
Hotels don't want to be left out of the enshittification that Airbnb seems to have turned into an artform. In the travel industry, your customers are nearly captives to your whims. And if your whims are not profitable enough, the tech bros are here to make you the money while saving you the effort.
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.
The reality is that most people who smoke/vape indoors will lie about it. I've witnessed this hundreds of times from hundreds of people. In every place I have lived I had neighbors who smoked (illegally) and lied about it to my face until I saw them doing it. I would bet that the system is 98%+ accurate and we are seeing the (many) false positives.
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.
Looks like hotels looked at the car rental industry and took a lot of inspiration.
Airlines: "Hold my beer!"
"Delta moves to eliminate set prices, use AI to set your personal ticket price", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44596355
This is not the same, the airline can set whatever price they want, AI or not, but I see the prices and then can decide whether I want to buy or not.
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.
Delta has never had set prices and this is fake outrage. Airlines have used algorithms since deregulation in the 70s to set prices. The “algorithm” use to be simpler based on “fair classes”. A fair class is not a simple - Main, C+ and FC. Two people sitting in main can have different fair classes.
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 understand why so many commentators are acting surprised at this morally dubious company. Many if not most companies coming out of YCombinator are just as bad. Just one case is uBiome. In fact, I would argue that YCombinator and the startup culture they create directly enabled companies to do exactly this.
I saw a little quote about the modern business landscape that seems to apply here:
“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.
Never assign incompetence to that which can be adequately explained by greed.
My new favourite saying!
Always check the bill, there are a slew of bullshit dark park-patterns here like charging you for stuff in the mini-bar you didn't take or pay-per-view you didn't watch.
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.
Since we are talking about hotel-related scams, I might as well mention getaroom.com and hotelreservations.com. These scum duplicate entire hotel websites (including logos and everything), and will claim to reserve a room, but when you click on the "go to confirmation page" link, they will quickly up-charge you by hundreds or even thousands of dollars - and they will charge that before you have a chance to confirm. And while some people apparently managed to get a reservation this way, there are also reports of people ending up without any reservation. In other words, they are a full-on scum. Check trustpilot if you don't believe me.
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.
Looking at one of these pictures it seems the device is not fitted to the ceiling but 30cm above ground. So not the best place to pick up CO or to detect fire.
CO disperses well, so there's no need for a CO detector to be mounted at any particular height. They're now commonly sold as combination smoke and CO detectors, so placing them at ceiling height is appropriate.
I don't think this thing has a smoke detector though?
In a healthy marketplace, customers stop using merchants that abuse customers, until they change their practices or go out of business and are replaced by more customer-responsive competitors.
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.
this is going to be a bad decade for the 1% false positives of a 99% accurate neural net
This is Fraud as a Service.
In the US, it feels like there is little recourse for these sorts of changes.
Consumer protections are not like in other places
I kept finding my balcony door ajar in my hotel room - an employee was smoking on my balcony.
All I can say is I will never stay at a Hyatt from reading this, so Hyatt and Rest and whoever owns that hotel can sort it all out. I don't smoke.
Remember when hotels charged outrageous fees to make a phone call from your room? That scam no longer works because everybody has a cell phone. Then they tried charging high fees for watching movies on the room's TV, and high fees for wifi. Those no longer work because everybody expects hotel wifi to be free and unlimited LTE is a thing now and nobody uses the TV in a hotel room any more.
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.
“A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”
I've never understood this old saw. The computer is just a tool. Somebody owns the computer, somebody installed it, somebody loaded software onto it. That's who should be held accountable.
Taken at face value, you couldn't even use a pocket calculator to back up a management decision.
"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.
That's exactly what I'm saying. So what earthly point is there in saying, "A computer can't make management decisions, because it can't take responsibility?"
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.
A colleague experienced this but I don't recall where. But they were furious about it and it was a challenge to get resolved.
I wonder if this is an actual Hyatt owned and managed property or is it a hotel brand associated with Hyatt. I also wonder what category of hotel it is.
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.
Next step: Hertz installs these in their cars.
Between this and Hertz's new AI damage detection models, we're seeing the enshitification of business travel reaching a new level, and also doing a great job of really ticking off a group of customers (business travelers) who are already irritated enough.
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.
There have always been attempts to launder fraud through intermediaries - computerized, bureaucratic, or otherwise. They think (well, know) if they abstract or obfuscate things in a novel way, that they'll have enough time to hit markets across states without sophisticated legislation before the legal immune systems can respond, potentially years later.
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.
Hanlon's razor doesn't cut it anymore.
I personally believe Hanlon's razor should never be applied to corporations. A solitary person, sure, but when multiple people are involved it tends more to malice than ignorance.
Very scummy behavior from Hyatt hotels. I'd always check out the negative reviews of hotels before booking, and this might have caught it
This is a microcosm for enshittification writ large. If no one cares about your individual complaint you’re fucked. Only in numbers do consumers wield any power. The 48 Laws of Power says, “what is unseen counts for nothing.” So make it seen. Make bullshit like this visible. And vote with your dollars. Better yet sue the smoke detector company. Make them demonstrate their flawless false positive rate in court. Bullshit, grifting companies keep getting away with stuff like this because there are no consequences. Make them feel it where it hurts the most: their bank account.
I have a startup idea for you my friend…
"enshittification writ large."
Good grief! We are actually going to have a shit list now:
Hertz, Hyatt are the first two entries in this historic development..
Paging DoNotPay.com bots..
(Smoking) computer says no.
Whenever someone charges me a smoking fee I assume they are just saying they don't want me staying there. I'll find some place either much better or much shittier that is appreciative of my business. The Hilton Garden Inn in Princeton NJ has charged both my and my wife a smoking fee on different dates because we were hiking. In Denver you aren't allowed to smoke on the streets, there's no terraces in the hotel, so we were charged a smoking fee after hot boxing our car. They aren't cleaning the room. It's ten cents of spray and an open window at most. I've stayed at hotels where they Febreeze every room daily. What a scumbag thing to do to your customers.
Man, I hate when companies do this kind of thing.
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.
The MBA way to earn money of AI and automation.
"Computer says pay me $$$"
"Why"
"AI demands it!"
Looks like nothing a little duct tape couldn't handle.
Why should I have to waste my time and duct tape on their shitty scam? :) Easier to just never stay at a Hyatt.
I have seen tradies attempt to ‘disable’ smoke particle detectors by putting tape or a rubber glove over the sensor. This technique often triggers the alarm almost immediately.
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.
Duct tape adhesives (including polyterpene resin) might register as VOCs. Now, if you duct taped a piece of absolutely clean aluminum foil to it, then that could be fine.
I'd take the opposite approach, put something in the room that continually triggers it so they keep coming up and then just ignore it eventually.
"Fire Safety Device Interference Fee: $1,000"
IANAL - but might doing that sift the burden of proof, and force Hyatt to show that the Rest device met regulatory standards as a fire detector?
I bet there are standards about this, and I’d also bet Rest has optimized their product for stealing money, not safety.