YOU TAP IN TO YOUR ROOM

These days you don’t need any of the above to unlock a hotel room, buy a mojito or snap a vacation photo. All you need is, well — you. At hotels like Alma Barcelona in Spain, a scan of your fingertips opens the door to your room. At Ushua?a Ibiza Beach Hotel in the Mediterranean, you can buy suntan lotion and a sarong with a tap of two fingers. On some Disney Cruise Line ships, facial recognition technology enables onboard photographers to easily group every candid picture they take of you so that you can later browse (read: buy) them.

Like it or not, we are living in an age of human holograms that welcome us to airport security checkpoints and luggage tags capable of texting us when our bags are lost. Technology and travel are becoming ever more fused, even at hotels where for centuries the basic demand has remained unchanged: a safe place to lay one’s head. Today, your head could spin from some of the amenities. At Hotel 1000 in Seattle the rooms have infrared signals that scan and detect body heat to ensure that the housekeeping staff doesn’t knock or barge in, while at Starwood’s Aloft Hotel chain, radio frequency identification allows you to skip the front desk and check in with your smartphone instead (the chain said that more than 10,000 guests have already tried it).

Arguably, the most compelling and unnerving of these technologies is biometrics — the measurement of physical or behavioural traits to verify identity. Once strictly in the realm of spy novels and science fiction flicks, biometrics are increasingly being used by real-world hotels, resorts and cruise ships. For some travellers, it signals a new era of convenience: no more inadvertently demagnetizing your room key or hiding your wallet in your shoe at the pool. For others, it’s yet another zone that Big Brother is penetrating (not to mention making “Mad Men”-style rendezvous less clandestine).

Biometric technology has been around for decades. Hotels in chains like the Four Seasons and Hyatt have used them to track their employees’ hours and whereabouts and to increase security on their properties. And a handful of hotels in the vanguard — Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Murano Resort and Kube, both in Paris — introduced biometric room keys years ago. (In Boston, Kimpton’s Nine Zero Hotel has a penthouse suite that opens with a flash of your iris.) Even so, many travellers were unaware that biometrics were being deployed.

Now, after years in the background, biometrics are slowly becoming a part of everyday life, popping up in stores, clubs, gyms. One of the most visible travel examples is evident at airports: Frequent fliers who have undergone background checks as part of U.S. programs like Global Entry and Clear can now be seen sailing through security after pausing at kiosks to verify their biometric information through fingerprint and iris scans. Millions of travellers who want to be fast and unfettered have willingly paid the price, both in terms of money ($100 for five years for Global Entry; $179 a year for Clear) and privacy (the applications require personal information like your passport number, fingerprints and photos).

Indeed, the technology has consumer advocacy groups and data privacy experts worried about civil liberties and the protection of personal data. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, for one, has outlined half a dozen areas of concern about biometrics, including how the data is stored and how vulnerable it is to theft or abuse (available at Epic.org/privacy).

Still, new research from the World Economic Forum and the Boston Consulting Group suggests that biometric identification will only become more prevalent as accuracy improves, eventually giving rise to a “fully automated” check-in, security, border-control and smart-visa system that could improve security and whittle down long lines at airports and borders.

“Check in for a flight would be expedited by replacing paper documents with an electronic passport,” explains a summary of the innovations laid out in the report, “as well as biometric traveller identification through fingerprints, facial recognition, or an iris scan.”

Hotels, too, are embracing technology and not simply by placing iPads in their rooms and lobbies. One of the most eager to adopt biometrics is the Ushua?a Ibiza Beach Hotel. If you think an island vacation ought to consist of a quiet afternoon sprawled on a beach towel and unplugged from the world, don’t bother making a reservation there. Last year, the hotel was using wristbands with radio frequency identification technology, or RFID, which relies on electromagnetic waves, to allow guests to instantly update their Facebook status by swiping the bands against sensors around the property. New this year: biometrics status updates. Guests input their fingerprints at kiosks and from then on, sensors in the “Facebook pillars” around the property allow them to tap two fingers to update their status with messages like, “Hanging out at the Ushua?a Ibiza Beach Hotel ... Jealous?”

For some, like my cousin Charlie, it was the breakfast of champions. He would visit Mami with a copy of El Diario folded under his arm. Mami would brew café con leche and set it on the plastic-covered dining room table, and together they would read the paper. The ritual was set — read a story, dip a slice of Gouda into the coffee, savor the gooey cheese, talk. Lamenting the sad state of the world, or rejoicing at some Puerto Rican kid’s triumph, was optional.

Now a lot more people will be able to savor part of that experience, sans coffee and gooey Gouda, as Columbia University recently acquired 5,000 images spanning 40 years of El Diario’s photographic coverage. The collection, part of Columbia’s Latino Arts and Activism Archive, is a rich documentation of another world — albeit one that has existed in plain sight of New Yorkers.

“The narrative about our city is often stitched to yesteryear’s European migration, or today, to waves of hipsters, with a splash of color thrown in on occasion,” Erica Gonzalez, the paper’s executive editor, wrote in an e-mail. “In that context, Latinos have long been treated as an ‘other’ at best, or as a nuisance or invisible at worst. What you see in the photos, in the archives, is how Latinos have been part of the fabric of this city for a long time, not beginning when marketers ‘discovered’ us.”Click on their website www.smartcardfactory.com for more information.