Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors”

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.

Seems like a candidate for class action lawsuits against the hotel, the brand, and the sensor company?

> There has got to be a way to penalize companies for attempting this kind of thing

Yes, don't go to them.

Love,

Canada

Yes it's called a lawsuit for defrauding consumers. Hopefully someone actually does it though

There is a way. Don’t give them any of your money.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

"unlocking revenue stream" is wild way to say theft

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.

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.

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!

> 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.

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?

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 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Wait, woodbine? A hotel literally owned by/named after a cigarette brand? You literally couldn’t make this up.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.