"I remember standing in Connecticut in some hotel with cheap wood paneling at three in the morning, " Berrard says.

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The inconspicuous lock hacking device is an adaption of one demonstrated at the Black Hat security conference in July by Cody Brocious, a hacker and software developer for Mozilla, who discovered and exploited a vulnerability in Onity locks, a cheap and popular hotel room lock that the company says are used on at least four million hotel rooms worldwide.

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Founded just seven months ago the app-startup offers both iPhone and Android users cheap deals on unfilled hotel rooms.

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This despite a cosy deal with the government that allowed the hotel to be built on interest-free bonds and operated with no tax, cheap rent, and even, for a while, a duty exemption on the luxury items that its managers imported to fill its rooms.

ECONOMIST: Red elephant

Hotel operators might not mind spending money on marketing so much if the Caribbean were otherwise a cheap and easy place to build and run hotels.

ECONOMIST: Caribbean tourism

On the other hand, if it's much lower than 86%, I'm going to suspect either some chicanery on the part of the seller (he's renting out a bunch of rooms really cheap, to whoever, in an effort to manipulate his occupancy percentage), or that the hotel's marketing isn't being approached very intelligently.

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