New member here - I am booked for tonight at a Novotel in the Netherlands and I was very surprised when I got a text message from a US number with a link to a cnry.in domain name. After some digging it turns out that this domain is operated by Canary Technologies, a software company that can handle guest online check-ins. I checked their terms of service (since they asked for a lot of personal information, including credit card details) and I was, for lack of a better word, horrified by their loose handling of personal data. The terms are extremely vague and broad (we store your data mainly in the US but it can be basically anywhere on the planet and we share your data with service providers - without providing a list of service providers) and, on top of that, they also sell my cookie data to advertisers. I was quite appalled that Accor would engage such a shady company to handle their European customers' personal data.

I have contacted the hotel and expressed my concerns and they have responded that they will try to check me in online (even though I said I would check in at the front desk) but not through the Canary-operated solution. Honestly, this made things worse as now I suspect that this "new" Canary solution is being pushed on them as a replacement to their internal systems, meaning that my personal data will automatically be transferred to the third parties when I book again.

Does anyone know more about this Canary Technologies company or why is Accor using them?

PS: I am fully aware that Accor already shares my personal data with other companies but they are companies in the same Accor group or marketing partners that won't harvest data from multple sources in order to resell it. What I'm concerned about is the fact that Canary Technologies are an absolutely awful company to be handling personal data, especially credit card details.