Wireless in Hospitality

Wireless in Hospitality

Saving costs and making money by PW Wireless Networks

In the beginning…

Hotels and Resorts were among the earliest adopters of wireless (RF) technology, to provide internet connectivity for paying guests. However, due to the development of internet services these dated connections can no longer effectively support paying guests. Whilst business people still want a premium service to keep on top of their workload, tourists now wish to post pictures, book event tickets, blog or tweet friends. And now, 85% of all hotel guests aged 6 and over have a wifi capable device and an interest in communicating with social networking sites.

The provision of wireless has migrated all across the Hospitality sector, and the differentiation it once offered to 5-star properties has gone. Guests are now sophisticated users of this technology, and with many organisations offering a level of free service, charging for basic connection moves towards a thing of the past.

The challenge is to provide a wireless infrastructure that will deliver generic services for all, with an ability to offer premium service to those that will pay. In addition, the wireless network can play a strategic role in the delivery of business-critical applications for the Hospitality business, from Hotels, conference centres, airports and theme parks, and the challenge is to support the delivery of all of these diverse applications from a single secure non-stop wireless network .

Restrictions of Early Fixed Price Contracts

The early installations were often supplied by service providers who tied the property to a fixed price, long term contract. Whilst this initially reduced implementation costs (and risk) for the property, it also created several issues:

•    The RF environment and technology is owned by a third party
•    Your billing is owned by someone else,
•    The quality of the coverage and the network suitability for “in-house” telephony and other layered services is controlled by someone else,
•    You cannot cover outside areas without permission,
•    You cannot add IP CCTV, or Location Services,
•    You cannot add business applications, to link it to your back office, as it is un-trusted

In essence, it is a network owned by a third party, for the benefit of that company, hosted on your property, for a nominal income at best. This was a good deal for the PAYG company, as they simply provided comms to the property, a payment landing page and gateway, some marketing brochures and then received a fixed payment from the property, typically for a 5 to 7 year contract.

In the Leisure Sector generally, and large scale resorts and theme parks in particular, wireless applications need to be used to drive down costs by improving on-site communications (eg with wireless phones) and the efficiency of roaming staff, in areas such as security, catering and cleansing etc. This cannot be achieved when the RF estate is “owned” by a third party.

The future of Wireless (and not just for Guests)

The new leaders in the sector are deploying their own wireless networks and managing the service delivery for the benefit of the property. Wireless is able to deliver its own ROI by supporting business applications in a cost effective manner.

Should you choose to manage your own RF platform, you can now run many business services for internal use such as telephony, location services, IP-CCTV, Building Management, EFTPOS and Order taking. You can also
segment guest access by offering a free to use service for general guest access and then offer a separate priority access for guests who will pay for a premium for a faster service, e.g conference / business users, and premium rate rooms.
The property has a choice when it comes to the provision of internet services:

1.    It can charge guests based on room type, or type of service (gaming, browsing etc) and then offer a wireless “sign on” ticket as appropriate to that guest. In this instance, the billing is done on check in, and is a simple process with no administrative overhead for the property.

2.    The property can continue to charge, but can now “off load” this whole service to the external PAYG Internet Service Provider, using a secure connection (SSID) to a provider such as iBahn or Swiss Telecom, such that they manage the internet handover. This means that the property has total control of the RF environment, and you can choose…

•    Which internet provider you want to work with
•    You can chose more flexible contracts
•    You can monitor the utilisation to make certain you are being paid the right amount
•    You can prioritise the traffic for internal applications like EFTPOS, and perhaps premium rooms, and conference delegates
•    Priorities can be given a time of day priority level – conference rooms may not require service at night – this bandwidth could then be given over to premium rooms, at these designated times,
•    You can decide what part of the estate has PAYG – or is free to use - such as the hotel lobby or bar areas.
•    You can offer premium services for gamers using their own handheld devices – either from their rooms or from lobby areas or even from outside leisure areas, with specific premium tickets,
•    If services are offered free to use, there is minimal IT support involved, as there is no billing to guests at all.

The key aspect is that even for paid services, the property does not need to offer IT support when the Guest’s PC fails, or the payment gateway bills the credit card ten times because the Guest is impatient and ignores the “do not press this more than once” warning and presses the “accept” key four times.

If the customer PAYG service is poor, the hotel can justifiably blame the PAYG vendor and aim to keep the customer happy for their next stay, to retain their long term custom. If it was their own in house service then they would need to keep the customer happy, resolve the issue and spend time (& money) with an IT trained member of staff which they don’t generally have.

The property needs control, it needs the income, it wants none of the IT risk… and our solution can deliver all of this with a “managed wireless” solution.

Building Secondary Spend at Resorts

There is also now a bigger opportunity to actively drive secondary spending by harnessing the wireless network to communicate directly with guests, using their own mobile devices such as iPhone, Blackberry, iPod, PSP etc, and these services will be targeted at guests based on their location at a resort.

•    Guests will be given an opportunity to sign up and register their mobile device, as part of the booking process (this also improves the CRM process for future contact)
•    Localised communications will serve to improve customer satisfaction during the visit, as it can help to move people around the attractions, and reduce bottlenecks within a theme Park
•    Guest groups can split up and still be “location aware” of their party members who want to do different things and meet later
•    With customer centric content, you can promote special offers from food concessions and bars, and also reduce wastage - offers can be tailored to people as you will know who they are and where they are in the Park
•    It can also help to promote secondary sales of hotel rooms, or book tables at restaurants etc.

Coverage and Capacity

Our solutions are built on a solid foundation; we start with detailed physical site surveys to ensure that the wireless deployment is planned to support coverage of all relevant areas in the property, and is then sized correctly, to ensure that there is sufficient capacity to support the delivery of all the required applications.

With our surveys, we will guarantee that the wireless technology will deliver these applications with the required quality of service. That will allow the property to focus on applications that will save costs and increase business efficiency.

The technology will be centrally managed, and will have a design brief that is based on a “Non-Stop” architecture, with room to expand. Given the dependency on networks within a hotel this is becoming more critical as additional and new applications such as PMS and VoIP start to run over the WiFi.

Over time, we are seeing that the number of client devices is expanding rapidly, and we are currently predicting a rise from 10% utilisation per hotel up to 40-50% in 2012. This will require a higher density of wireless deployment to support the variety of applications and volume of users, as well as a system that can be manipulated by the property to accommodate these demand changes over time.

For more information regarding the future of wireless technologies in Hotels and the cost saving initiatives available from PW Wireless Networks, please call 01925 751638 or email advice@pwwireless.co.uk