This week we are upgrading four IHG properties to provide higher capacity guest Internet and improve reliability by installing redundant guest gateways. If a single guest gateway fails, the other will takeover with a loss of guest Internet of no more than 2 minutes when the failover occurs.

Holiday Inn Express – Ludington, MI – 102 rooms – 12 Megabit with Redundant Guest Gateways and ISPs

Hotel Indigo – Downtown – Chicago, IL – 165 rooms – 10 Megabit with Redundant Guest Gateways

Holiday Inn – Manitowoc, WI – 204 rooms – 32 Megabit with Redundant Guest Gateways

Holiday Inn – Decatur, AL – 205 rooms – 17 Megabit with Redundant Guest Gateways and ISPs

In a keynote speech at the one-day Hotel Technology Conference, held June 17 in Macau, Douglas C. Rice, EVP and CEO of trade association Hotel Technology Next Generation (HTNG), said in-room technologies were frequently outdated and failing to meet guests’ expectations.

“Twenty to twenty five years ago, when you visited a hotel room, you saw things you didn’t have at home and that is no longer true. People now have more at home than they have in a hotel,” he said addressing the audience of hospitality IT professionals.

“The guest room technology is antiquated versus what people now have in their home properties. [At home], people now have home networks, sophisticated telephony, environmental controls…and it’s going to get worse because homes are getting more sophisticated at a very rapid rate as [technology] prices are coming down,” he said.

Part of the problem, explained Rice, is the large number of different systems that hotels typically have and the complexity of system integration. A large hotel such as The Venetian Macau, where the event was held, can have as many as 200 different systems, which create problems for integration, Rice said.

“There are many systems to integrate and there are technologies that exist to help all this, but the skills to manage them are specialized and are very expensive. If you’re running a typical 300-room hotel, you simply cannot hire the skills that really know the technologies that help,” he said.

Problems caused by numerous systems—in areas including accounting and control, F&B, front desk, telephony—include inconsistent platforms, different operating systems, different development tools and different technical approaches, he added.

“Every hotel is different. There are probably no more than a few hotels in the world that have completely identical systems to another hotel. There is very little consistency. When you start to integrate systems and you don’t have consistency, it makes it more difficult,” he said.

The problem is exacerbated by a lack of products specific to the hospitality sector, Rice added. “You have a lot of vendors that have non hospitality specific products. Some of them [are doing] hospitality specific versions of their products and that is great, that is what our industry needs, but some of them haven’t and in many cases those interfaces are trying to make up for the fact that the systems were really designed for something other than a hotel,” he said.

Limitations in financial resources mean hotels also don’t always IT staff on board capable of resolving interoperability problems, he added. “The solution requires skill levels that are simply not practical for hotels to deploy. You can’t hire the skills you need at the pay scale you have,” Rice said.

As a result, hotels tend to shy away from upgrades and instead keep the systems that they have leading hotels to stay outmoded, he said.

“Systems are hard to support. We have a web of interconnected systems that need to talk to each other…the safest and cheapest choice for a hotel is to keep what you have and that is what a lot of hotels have done. Guest rooms have fallen behind where they need to be to meet people’s expectations,” he said.

Rice also attacked hotels for engaging staff in time-wasting activities by doing manual checks, for example, of the mini-bar when it has not been used, and said greater use of technology could be used to improve operational efficiency as well as reduce wastage of energy resources.

“Staff spend time doing the wrong things. They don’t do things based on whether it brings value to the guests. They do things based on the sheet that tells them what they are supposed to do today. Technology can help solve a lot of these issues that are wasting labour in ways that isn’t helping the hotel,” he said.

• 10,000 hours of video games
• 200,000 emails
• 20,000 hours of TV
• 10,000 hours of cell phone conversation
• Less than 5,000 hours reading books

Back to the Sheraton:  the business center computers were running Office 2003 and an old version of Acrobat so I couldn’t open my email attachments. A lady came into the business center looking to print a document (no shared printing service from the rooms at this hotel; where is the PrintMe when you need it?) and she had to move one of the PCs out of the drawer to plug in her USB drive.  How frustrating when you are already running fast in the morning to get things done.

Finally, when is Starwood going to wakeup and understand that the business traveler shouldn’t have to pay $9.95 for Internet at a Sheraton?  Even Hyatt finally got this announcing last week that Internet at all of their hotels will be at no charge going forward.  Starwood is one of the most progressive franchisors, now they need to catch up and realize that the business traveler pays for the room and meals and isn’t willing to pay for highspeed Internet.  This is probably why the Hilton Garden Inn I passed on my way to the Sheraton was full while the Sheraton looked like it was running at about 25% occupancy.

Some brands discourage the Mitel 200 ICP in favor of the Mitel 3300 or open standards solutions from Avaya, Innovation and Cisco.  Other franchisors highly encourage their franchisees to purchase the Mitel 200. What are your thoughts? Are buyers of the Mitel 200 ICP buying a dead end product that is technologicaly obsolete or does the platform have all of the features that smallers properties will ever need?

2. Cancel maintenance contracts on phone systems. For what many hotels pay in maintenance on obsolete phone systems they could lease new systems. Candidates for maintenance contract elminations are Fujitsu, Hitachi, Mitel SX200 and SX2000, and older NEC systems.  When replacing a hotel system its a good idea to do a thorough circuit analysis to determine if you are oversubsribed on voice lines.  Even if you don’t lease a new system you will almost certainly be better off paying as you go for maintenance.

3.  Negotiate new Internet bandwidth contracts.  I am amazed how many hotels I come accross that are paying $800 or more for a single Internet T1.  Recently we migrated a 200 room IHG property from a dedicated AT&T 1.5MB T1 to a Comcast Business Class 16MB Internet connection with a 6MB load balanced AT&T DSL Internet feed.  The performance improvement was over 1000% and the cost savings $24,000 over five years.

2. High Definition TVs and Service

3. Business Centers with PCs equipped with Skype

4. Energy Management Systems

5. Windows Terminals (instead of PCs)

Many hotels are oversubsribed on voice services and undersubscribed on Internet bandwidth. The good news is that a new generation of combined voice and Internet services provides the ability to scale voice services on demand and use that capacity for the Internet when voice calls are not being made. Major carriers such as XO and Level 3 along with regional carrier NuVox offer services tailored specifically to the hospitality market. Other competitive solutions from regional and national cable companies can offer very competitive solutions often savings hundreds if not thousands of dollars per month.

Recently Ipanema was able to migrate the Holiday Inn – Manitowoc WI from a single AT&T 1.5MB T1 to a Comcast 16MB cable Internet connection improving Internet performance 1000% while saving the hotel$27,000 over five years.

2) Eliminate maintenance contracts on legacy telephone systems

Many hotels are paying more for quarterly maintenance on obsolete phone systems than they would if they lease a brand new phone system including maintenance. One option is to keep the existing system and pay for maintenance on an time and materials basis. A second option is to lease a new system with maintenance. This would be a good time for a voice service review to see how much your hotel can save on unnecessary voice service from your phone service company.

Recently Ipanema Solutions provided a existing hotel a new Avaya telephone system on a lease to own basis. After cost savings from eliminating a maintenance contract on a legacy NEC system and migrating to VoIP telephone system with a regional cable company the hotel is saving $6,000 per year and increased bandwidth to guest rooms by over 300%.

3) Work with a primary voice and Internet service provider to get multi property service discounts

Many small management companies don’t realize that carriers will offer discounts to their individual properties if they signup all or most of their properties. These discounts almost always are greater than the franchisor discounts.

Recently XO offered American Liberty Hospitality, a Houston, TX based managed company with Hilton, Best Western, IHG and independent properties a discount of 15% on all voice and data services for their properties in Texas. This amounts to a savings of thousands of dollars per month over AT&T.

4) Maintain your business center thru a managed service agreement

Many hotels still maintain their business centers installing software updates, anti-virus, anti-porn and new applications by having a technician perform this work on-site. For the cost of a single technician visit once a year you can subscribe to a managed service program that will install updates to Microsoft Windows, Adobe Acrobat, anti-virus, anti-porn, all three major browsers and applications like Skype and PrinterOn for an entire year.

Did you know that not having updated anti-virus and firewall software on your business center PCs can lead to automated bots being installed by unknowing users. These bots are used by remote hackers to perform illegal activities. At best this consumes your guest bandwidth and at worst your hotel business can be used to remotely support illegal activities such as credit card theft and pornographic material distribution. In the last year we discovered an unprotected PC being used to distribute illegal copies of movies

5) Implement controller based WIFI equipment

Recently Ipanema Solutions replaced 50 stand alone and individually managed access points at the Dana Hotel in Chicago with a managed solution from Ruckus Wireless. The Ruckus solution allows firmware updates to be deployed to all fifty access points at the push of a button on a management console. This means upgrading all 50 APs can be done in less than 15 minutes. Prior to the Ruckus solution the access points would have to be upgraded individually taking 5 to 10 minutes per AP. Total technician time to upgrade the APs would take 3 to 5 hours and because its was a manual process would be hit or miss if any of the APs were off-line during the upgrade.

Having a controller based WIFI solution saves days of technicians time annually and allows properties to quickly deploy the latest firmware to access points which in turn allow their properties to support the latest guest WIFI devices such as notebook, minibooks, game machines and mobile phones.