3VR Security, a vendor for intelligent surveillance and search, announced that Hilton Americas-Houston, the largest hotel in Houston, Texas, has deployed 3VR technology to enhance their surveillance systems and provide guests with service and safety unprecedented in the hospitality industry.
3VR Security, a vendor for intelligent surveillance and search, announced that Hilton Americas-Houston, the largest hotel in Houston, Texas, has deployed 3VR technology to enhance their surveillance systems and provide guests with service and safety unprecedented in the hospitality industry.
Despite the extensive number of surveillance cameras installed by hotels, retailers and other organizations, for most security personnel, the captured footage is largely useless. The data piles up and security teams must sift through hundreds of hours of video when they need to find footage relating to an incident, a time-consuming and unproductive task. The 3VR platform is the first solution that makes it possible to find relevant footage in seconds rather than hours and get real value from surveillance, using technology that indexes and structures the video, making it searchable, organized and manageable.
The 24-story, 1,200-room hotel, located in downtown Houston, is the city's largest conference hotel with more than 91,500 square feet of meeting space. With 3VR's surveillance technology, Hilton is able to guarantee guest safety and security, contributing to its current position as the number-one conference hotel in Houston. 3VR's sophisticated facial recognition, LPR and motion analytics combine with 3VR's video quality to enable the hotel to identify and investigate in ways that were not possible before. For example, hotel security staff have established a watchlist to help them monitor individuals who frequent the hotel but are not guests or employees. Alerts can notify security staff of a person's arrival on the premises and improve situational awareness throughout the hotel.
"I have been in hotel security since 1990 and never seen anything that is able to do the things 3VR technology does," said John Alan Moore, Director of Security and Life Safety at Hilton Americas-Houston. "It is years ahead of the DVR we previously installed, we are getting more than 90-percent accuracy for facial recognition which can do things we had never even thought about. Not only is it immensely valuable from a security standpoint, but it has also empowered us to take hotel customer service to the next level. We want to blow our guests away with our quality of service and are lucky to be the first hotel in Houston to use 3VR."
Serving 624,618 guests per year, the hotel also employs the 3VR system to ensure the best possible service for their customers. For example, Hilton locates lost guests or their possessions by using 3VR's facial, color, directional and object search capabilities. Recently hotel staff were able to find a misplaced suitcase within minutes by pinpointing surveillance footage of the luggage entering the hotel and then following its path by searching based on color and object.
"In a hotel as large as ours, it's hard to locate a person, let alone a suitcase," said Moore. "3VR helps us find the needle in the haystack."
Hilton has also extended the use of 3VR to ensure timely and quality valet service. If guests experience a long wait time or vehicle damage, video footage of the incident can be instantly located using 3VR's search and LPR features to determine exactly what happened so hotel representatives can react accordingly. Additionally, the hotel will soon be integrating 3VR with their reservation and front of house systems so that staff can prepare in advance for VIP arrivals and requests. They will also be using 3VR's people counting functionality to identify customer traffic, flow and peak times for specific areas, which are unprecedented offerings in the hospitality industry.
3VR also provided Hilton with new abilities to identify and address fraud at the hotel, including employee time theft monitoring and prevention. With more than 700 employees and an annual payroll of more than US$16 million, employee time theft has a significant impact. With their previous DVR system, it was so time-consuming to crosscheck timecard exceptions and verify that employees were on site when they claimed to be, that employee time theft was nearly impossible to avoid. Now these crosschecks take no more than a few minutes, allowing the hotel to crack down on the practice of requesting time adjustments and save money that previously they had not had the means to recoup.