Tell HN: UPM, my hotel front desk startup, has launched | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: UPM, my hotel front desk startup, has launched

prleap.com

50 pointsdaeken22 comments

Funny story: We went on a road trip recently. Checked into a hotel, were given a magnetic stripe key card and a room number, hauled our bags upstairs, attempted to open the door to the room ... and discovered that it was already occupied. Another guest was already in the room, with the inside bar lock in place (so the door would only open two inches).

In a crazy coincidence, we spent the next night in a different hotel in a different city and the same thing happened again.

I was surprised by this. I had assumed that the system that tracks reservations, available rooms, etc, would somehow be connected to the system that reprograms the magnetic stripe keys. I thought it would be harder for the front desk to hand out a second set of keys without some kind of warning message ("Hey, you already checked someone into that room ... are you sure you want to give out 3 more keys to the SAME ROOM?"). Apparently I've overestimated the room key/reservation systems in place at most hotels (another commenter here mentioned using DOS for reservations?!).

So, does UPM solve this problem? :)

I went into this with the same assumption and was disappointed to find out how wrong I was. There are two separate systems in play: PMS (property management system) and lock management. A PMS may provide everything from online booking to PBX management. In larger properties, these systems will be connected ("interfaced" in hotel lingo), but it's rare to see this in a small property; it's insanely expensive as it stands.

So where we stand right now is that if you're already interfaced with PMS, our system drops in and works with it no problem, but it's still expensive to get such a setup. We're working on our own PMS API which will allow much simpler, direct communication with our system; we hope we can drastically reduce the cost by doing so, as the current state of affairs is poor.

first off, i've never seen such ridiculous stock photography as i see on your home page. Is the shot from 1981 a joke?

Secondly, as a former hotel manager, i see this as a hack. You're selling me a replacement to my existing system. The value is in saving a few bucks but my security concerns go up.

The real problem is that if a master key gets lost, every hotel door needs to be recoded manually with a new card. Fix that and i'm sold.

congrats on the launch.

Don't sweat the stock pictures for now. It's right at home with all of the other ridiculous stock photography that's invaded corporate America. You're selling to people who might still use dos for reservations.

I would have a look-see here though:

http://www.upmsolutions.com/affiliates.html

Not to be overly critical, but the "coming soon" just doesn't fit (literally and figuratively).

Oh good god. Not being on that side, I hadn't looked at that page... that has to be dealt with pronto. Good lord that's bad.

Throw in the Yahoo! exclamation point and you're golden! I don't think I've ever seen that font used except at Yahoo! (at least, that's what it reminds me of).

You hadn't looked at that page yet? This is your startup, no?

With respect to the stock photos, they're downright terrible (and have been a constant source of jokes for us since the site was designed) but it's low on our priority list.

As for the security side of things, we have fairly advanced mechanisms in place that make it far more secure than the existing system. Of course, we could have something malicious in our product itself; this sort of accusation is one we fully expect we'll get at some point, but having a well known figure in the hotel access control market (not sure if I'm able to namedrop here, as I'm not sure if the business side is making that public right now or not) gives us at least some degree of credibility here, we think.

Totally agreed on the master keys, but it's a tough problem to solve for offline locks. We do have some things in the pipeline that will make this far, far more managable, but quite honestly I don't see them being economically viable for smaller hotels. Of course, updating the doors is simpler in smaller hotels anyway, but it's still an issue.

Thanks!

Anyone who wrangles hardware gets mad respect from me. Look forward to seeing how you guys do.

It just goes to show that we're surrounded by interesting niches hiding in plain sight in everyday life.

Congrats Daeken! Nice big niche, too...

Gotta love the quote: "In today’s tough economy, hotel owners are striving just to keep their doors open" for a lock management system...

How did you come up with an idea like this (for instance, did you work in an hotel before) ?

Our CEO was working in tech support in the industry and the startup we were previously working on failed. We started talking about it and it sort of just happened.

Congrats on the launch!!! I have to agree on the feedback - the website does not look very 2010 to me, it looks like a 'professional' web template from the late 90's. I understand wanting stock photography to have the 'human' element but I'd take some ACTUAL pictures yourself :)

'Unified Platform Management' is kind of a boring name :\ Very generic and 'corporate' sounding but maybe that's what hotels need to trust you.

Finally, the text on the homepage needs some spice! Some headlines, bullet points, and bold/italics would really help to guide people's eyes to 'We have a solution for you!'

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell

Well done on launching! What sort of software powers this? Could you tell us more about the technical side of how your system works.

Thanks! I'll be writing a blog post on the tech shortly (actually moving right now -- on the road but saw our press release pop up), but a quick rundown: at the core is Pylons, with a bunch of custom modules for making sqlalchemy nicer, handling forms in a sane way etc; on the frontend, it's your standard HTML and CSS, but uses "pyvascript", a Python->JS compiler I wrote for this, which supports real macros. I spent quite a while building up the framework to simplify the development, and I plan on releasing all of it when I have the time.

In the spirit of a recently created post, how long did it take you to build this, from conception to release?

We started talking about it in October of 08 or so, aiming to replace one small, expensive piece of hardware (a UDP-serial bridge, in effect) with some software; by December or so we decided to replace the whole system. I built a very initial prototype by March 09 or so, showed it to some key people, then trashed it and started work on what became ModuLock. We arrived at a rough version of this around March of this year, and installed into our first (beta) property in May. So to answer your question, something like 21 months since conception and 15 months of development and testing for the actual product.

Looks like an interesting system. If I were planning a hotel I'd certainly consider this, along with replacements for the crappy in-room entertainment software.

Regarding the press release, in the future, I'd put the mortal readable function of your product first. The first sentence of your press release doesn't mean anything to most people. The second half of the third sentence finally gets to the point.

Thanks for the input. I'm largely just on the tech side and didn't work on writing this (didn't see it until it went out, actually), but I tend to agree. We're totally focused on existing properties, who will obviously understand the terms used, but the press release should be at least readable at a high level by anyone. As we move out of the subniche we're in, I'd like to see this improve.

I wouldn't be surprised if many hotel owners, planners, etc didn't know what an "HT22 encoder" is, or that they were a rip-off. "Expensive proprietary key card system" rings everyone's bell.

Yea, good point. Most of the little mom and pop hotels know, due to dealing with them on a daily basis, but at even midsized hotels you rarely interact with the encoder directly -- only when it breaks. The messaging needs work, for sure.

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