Last week I wrote a post entitled "Creepy Roommate Stories" where I implied that having roommates can really suck. Although it's often necessary to have a roommate in places like London, New York, Tokyo or San Francisco, it can definitely be a major privacy invasion. In that post I told you about a roommate that drilled a hole in my bedroom wall, presumably for ventilation... Of course, his motive was more perverted than that. That's creepy. Anyways, that guy was kicked out shortly thereafter.
Sherpa contributor Darrin Underwood forwarded me an article this morning that shines a light on issues with hotel security and an incident with a well known, and attractive, ESPN personality named Erin Andrews.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091007/ap_on_en_tv/us_espn_andrews_video_hotel_security
As I speak with more people about Sherpa's home based lodging platform I've learned that the first concern that people raise has to do with security. After all, if you are operating a make shift hotel from the comfort of your own home, how would you know if the guest you are hosting is a sex offender or had a capricious criminal record? These valid concerns got us thinking about methods that traditional hotels use to safeguard your safety in an attempt to come up with some ideas to apply to Sherpa customers. What we found... or didn't find... raised some serious questions about hotel security.
More than 10 years ago I studied the hotel business as the primary subject matter of my travel and tourism undergraduate degree. I knew that there were some primitive methods that hotels use to safeguard your identity and security so it would be difficult for someone to walk up to the front desk and find out if you're staying at their hotel or obtain a room key to your suite. However, that's the extent of most security procedures. There's no way of knowing whether the person in the adjoining room next to you is a criminal, sex offender, communist (Glenn Beck thinks I should be afraid of these people, so I guess I ought to be :)) or some other unsavory sort. The article referenced above sheds a bright light on hotel security, or lack thereof.
Which is why we are going to take things several steps further by providing homeowners with a free sexual predator record search on any traveler/lodger that they host in their part-time hotel, vacation rental or their home exchange experience. We will also provide homeowners with the ability to conduct a criminal background search and we will feed this information back into the booking record so our homeowner customers can quickly assess any risk and make a decision to accept or reject the booking based on this information. We think this gives home based hoteliers better control and makes home based lodging safer than staying in a hotel where the person staying in the room next to you might be a wacko and you would never know it.
Russ
