When it comes to travel, any streamlined, simple process is a good one! Both Northwest and Alaska airlines offer e-boarding passes on your smartphone, and now mobile technology is coming to hotels, too.

Holiday Inns are experimenting with technology allowing guests to unlock their rooms using their phones, skipping the check-in, key hand-off process. To find out where you can use this service first, and how it will work, just keep reading.

The service will debut in a Houston and Chicago-area Holiday Inns and will allow guests to register with the hotel and download an app onto their phones. Then, upon check-in, guests need to simply open the confirmation email on their phone and hold it up to a sensor on the door to unlock it.

If it works, technology would work in any hotel that installed the door sensors, and the app should run on most mobile phones.