By Jake Umbrage
Here at NoiseAware, we spend a lot of time trying to help vacation-rental owners and managers answer a singular question: What the heck is going on in my property right now? We have all been to those dinner parties that blow up into ragers. We have all probably witnessed someone have a bit too much to drink, and smash a wall because they lost the longest road in the Settlers of Catan. Things happen, it’s life. But this is your life, your property, your livelihood. Naturally, you want people comfortable and excited to stay at your listings. But you need to feel confident that your properties are safe.
NoiseAware’s noise monitoring solution does a stellar job alerting you that things may have gotten out of hand, noise-wise. Our thresholds and proprietary NRS (noise risk score) algorithm are keyed in to let you know when volume is rising too high.
And now, with CrowdControl, you’ll know when occupancy is rising too high, too.
We do occupancy detection right – by putting guest privacy first.
We’re going to be honest with you, short of installing cameras all over the place or putting some AI or human in charge of counting every single person that enters your property, it’s going to be hard for anyone to tell you exactly how many people are at your property. And we’d never do that anyway, since we’re completely committed to protecting guest privacy. What we can tell you is when it looks like a crowd is forming. When your two-person maximum occupancy suddenly starts to look a lot more like a group of people, and when a group of people starts to look more like a crowd of people, we’ll know and you’ll know.
We don’t count people, we count hellos.
We do this by detecting the number of wireless signals from devices that society has become so accustomed to: phones, headphones, tablets, laptops, smart watches, Fitbits. You may not know this, but these devices are as social as people. They are constantly looking for other devices they know, and saying hello to every device they meet.
Our occupancy detection software is constantly taking note of the number of “hellos” at your property, both when it is vacant, and when it is occupied. We monitor the usual trend so we can identify an unusual trend. And we are using what we know about those hellos and that specific property to tell you immediately when a crowd seems to be gathering.
Combining this information with our noise alerts gives you much deeper insight into what’s happening between check-in and check-out, without ever compromising guest privacy. Our engineering team is really excited to release this new feature. Get to see it live in action on your dashboard when using NoiseAware to protect your properties. And as always, rest easy.
Jake Umbrage is the Senior Director of R&D for NoiseAware, a published children’s book author, navy veteran and friend of canines everywhere.