Analysis & Commentary:

WHEN A TERRORIST CHECKS IN

As reported by Jennifer Disabatino, Hilton Hotels Corp has a customer relationship management (CRM) system in place that tracks guest preferences. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, that same system may be used to help the hotel chain track terrorist suspects.

Tim Harvey, CIO at Hilton, said the company, based in Beverly Hills, California, has had a few isolated requests from the FBI to provide information on guests following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Now, however, Harvey and his IT staff are preparing for a more sustained form of cooperation, by alerting staff if a suspected terrorist checks into the hotel.

Hilton owns several hotel chains, including Hilton, Hampton Inn, Doubletree and Embassy Suites Hotels, as well as landmarks such as New York's Waldorf-Astoria and Chicago's Palmer House. All have been connected to the Hilton CRM system since spring 2000.

In addition to tracking customer information by Hilton Honors number, a frequent-guest program, Hilton can search for a guest by name, ZIP code, phone number or a unique identifier that's a combination of all four criteria.

The system is used for targeted marketing, fulfilling guest preferences and automatically adding points to a participant's Hilton Honors account. Now the system, which uses IBM's Informix relational database and runs on Unix, could be used to trigger an alarm if a suspected terrorist checks in.

"We anticipate at some point in time, somebody's going to come to us and say, 'Can you do a greater level of scrutiny?' I suspect there's going to end up being names of people that you want to know -- names, aliases, addresses," Harvey said. "Since we use profiles for reservation booking anyway, you could create a series of profiles that end up getting red-flagged. That technology exists today. It would be just a matter of incorporating the profiles."

The only real obstacle would be policy and politics, he said.

Today, Hilton holds the information on its frequent customers, as well as data on customers over the past six months, in a database center in Memphis.

"We keep up with about 14-plus million customers," Harvey said. Of those, the company has profiles on about 4 million, he said. The data center collects information at check-in and at check-out, he said.