Panasonic and Luxury Hotel Partner Create a Safer Guest Experience in San Francisco
Downtown San Francisco is booming, and with its central location to tourist destinations and attractions it greets more than a million guests each year. This, along with the current homeless population in the city, create a unique problem and hotels want to ensure that visitors and hotel guests are safe at all costs while enjoying their stay in the city.
For the most part, hotels located in the heart of downtown San Francisco don’t experience any significant security issues; however, the Loss Prevention Lead at a popular international hotel chain explains that the size of the property makes it tough to cover all bases because you can’t be everywhere at once. Occasionally, the hotel experiences missing property and vandalism issues, but one of its biggest challenges is the fact that there are a lot of homeless trying to come in, and keeping them out can be difficult because of the multiple entrance points.
As a result, the hotel partnered with STAC Systems and Panasonic to develop a pilot program of its WV-ASF900 FacePro™ Facial Search and Recognition System beginning in March 2016. To support the system, a half-dozen Panasonic 6 Series i-PRO cameras have been installed as well. The big difference with the addition of FacePro is the system is searching for faces all the time – no matter what – which is a huge asset to the property.
Currently, the hotel’s security staff have registered 100 people as having trespassed, or who have been restricted from entering the property over the past year. Even if trespassers are given a warning, many still return to the hotel and security often finds them in meeting rooms, stairwells, and ballrooms.
The hotel is continuing to work and refine the system, but the good news is that if a person of interest walks in front of its cameras they can effectively identify and catch them before they create an issue. Police and security staff are excited with the technology. Law enforcement see facial recognition technology as an opportunity and something that can be used in other hotels, shopping centers and other public locations.
For more on our FacePro Facial Recognition system and the San Francisco hotel installation, check out the full case study here.
