JW Marriott Mumbai Sahar has addressed security risk with intelligent key management technology, explains Krishnan Srinivasan, General Manager – India, Traka.
Calculating efficiency can be an inexact science within hospitality, which is a complex web of operations. There are multiple sectors within a property’s ecosystem and numerous components within each sector impact productivity.
Still, hotel operators who can identify inefficiencies and take the necessary steps to fix them through data-proven solutions position themselves to optimise operations and present a seamless product to their guests.
One of the largest hotels in India embarked on such an endeavour – and the resulting impact has been definitive.
In early 2024, the JW Marriott Mumbai Sahar was operating similarly to many hotels in India and across the world as it relates to its physical keys.
An employee would manually issue them at the beginning and end of every shift and record transactions in a register, which was the hotel’s only audit trail of usage. The distribution process inevitably created a time-consuming queue at the beginning or end of every shift, as employees waited their turn for the employee issuing keys.
This process was susceptible to lost keys, an occurrence that often wasn’t discovered until the beginning or end of a shift.
Employees would occasionally keep their keys in their pockets and forget they were in there, which negatively impacted operations and represented a security risk.
It also caused disagreements among employees who would present differing accounts of when, where and to whom a key was issued, which hindered staff’s ability to compile an accurate compliance report.
Collectively, hotel staff would spend an hour and a half each day just issuing and returning keys, with additional time spent when a key was misplaced.
Management identified this operational and security inefficiency and began to evaluate potential solutions.
“Guest safety is our top priority”
Intelligent key cabinets have seen a growth in adoption in a variety of industry verticals, including in hospitality, which typically has varying levels of security access assigned among its staff. JW Marriott Mumbai Sahar management knew it wanted to prioritise the safe storage and management of its most critical keys – master keys that access guest floors.
“Guest safety is our top priority, and we ensure that our door-lock system for guest floor access is always safe, secure and well-managed,” said Kunal Chauhan, General Manager, JW Marriott Mumbai Sahar.
In addition to safely storing and managing the keys, the cabinet needed to integrate with the hotel’s overall access control system to streamline operations and make onboarding for staff as easy as possible, as well as provide clear and simple audit reports for compliance purposes.
“From a software utilisation perspective, it’s very user-friendly and works within the parameters we need it to,” added Mangesh Gadekar, Director of Loss Prevention, JW Marriott Mumbai Sahar.
The cabinet that the hotel uses now stores more than 100 keys for guest floor access as well as multi-purpose keys.
Management can assign access to certain keys, which cuts down on the possibility of unauthorised usage and maintains a real-time audit trail of who had which key and when.
If a certain key isn’t returned by a designated time, the system will send an alert to a manager, which reduces the time spent recognising a key is lost and subsequently searching for it.
Moreover, the system eliminated the need for an employee to manually check keys in and out, which allowed the hotel to allocate personnel elsewhere within the facility.
Because of the adoption of the key cabinet, key distribution, which previously took 8-10 minutes per key, now takes only 15 seconds.
When multiplied by hundreds of employees each day, the reduction is considerable for a property as large as the 588-room JW Marriott Mumbai Sahar – which is already considering additional cabinets for other departments within the hotel.
It’s worth noting that management embarked on an in-depth cost analysis regarding its key cabinet, as they, and every hotel, do for any new technology.
Because solutions within hospitality are constantly evolving, management wanted to ensure that the cabinet they were proceeding with was the best option for them.
In considering the impact on efficiency noted above, combined with properly securing the most critical assets within the property, the return on investment was clear.
“If we were to remove the system and revert to manual operations, it would not improve efficiency,” continued Kunal Chauhan.
“In fact, it would likely lead to greater dissatisfaction, as people expect a system designed to simplify their work. Ensuring reliability in such instances is important.”
The process that management at JW Marriott Mumbai Sahar went through in recognising a security risk, evaluating potential solutions, identifying the best choice and integrating it into operations is a perfect case study that other hotels should consider when striving towards peak efficiency.
The key cabinet it uses represents a foundational solution that can impact nearly every department within the hotel and scale to meet diverse needs in daily operations.
