Accor and Canary Technologies
 

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.

I don't know anything about Canary technology, but there is a simple answer to your problem : don't do OLCI and check-in at the hotel. OLCI is totally useless.

It is a IT provider for hotels , they sell CRM suite they use internally . This system can be used by hotels independantly , however it can be rolled out in all hotels

this seems to be a single isolated case , cause i also havent seen or heard about canary , and accor recently signed a contract with a similar german company which provides same product/services

as goldorak said , OLCI is pretty useless in accor anyway cause you still need to go to desk everytime and do all paperwork , except maybe for specific requests

Accor management is aware of it and are "working on it and we can expect new features released soon" based on what i have been told by insiders

To be honest , they are quite late on that topic , compared to Hilton or Marriott for instance , where you can skip the checkin-desk (if i got it correctly works only if you have been in that hotel once) and manage almost everything from your phone (checkin , virtual room keys on your phone , select your room , request amenities , etc .... )

I've never heard of them before, or ever received a text message with a link to check in. Sounds like something the hotel is doing in its own. The hotels are independently owned entities.

I never do online checkin, but do often get a phone call from the concierge on the day of my stay, asking if there is anything they can do in advance of my arrival, and what my arrival time might be. But nothing that's automated.