A German hotel management company has debuted the industry's first anonymous guest socializing application, MeetMeIn.
Launched yesterday at Holiday Inn Berlin City East, the app lets hotel guests socialize anonymously and learn about hotel promotions.
The service is being tested by Grand City, is a Berlin management company that operates more than 110 hotels in Germany, most are on a management contract with sister companies, plus a handful more in the rest of Europe for a total of 13,000 hotel rooms.
Guests receive an online code to access the MeetMeIn site, which they can then use to socialize with each other virtually, like on other social networks and instant messaging chat sites.
Guests will be invited to share their interests. People who are in town to see the theatre could compare notes on show, and people looking for nightlife could swap tips. Information is anonymized, meaning that the location and identification of both the sender and receiver are protected.
"Close lobbies" is a feature that lets groups at a hotel have private discussions among themselves, such as at conferences and meetings, so they can exchange information and comments in real-time, yet "privately."
The tool can also be used to market promotions in the hotel, such as happy hour in the bar, to guests, who can use menus to select which type of information they are most interested in receiving.
It's not the only innovation in digital content coming out of Germany. In its new same-day booking app Hotels Now (aimed to compete against Blink and HotelTonight), HRS has added a Facebook and Foursquare application that lets users opt in to see where their contacts have checked in on a map and then use that information to pick which of the same-day bookable hotels most interest them.
This is similar to news that Tnooz reported last week that HRS has developed a separate app that lets users see a a heatmap that plots friends’ check-ins.