Hospitality Success Stories

Customer: Four Points by Sheraton – Ann Arbor

The Four Points by Sheraton – Ann Arbor is the leading hotel for meetings, conventions and weddings in the Ann Arbor Metro Area. The hotel is a portal to the community as it has very high standards for the guest experience. The Four Points by Sheraton has the most advanced guest communications network of any hotel in southeast Michigan. This network provides up to 6 megabit of Internet capacity to guest and meeting rooms and can provide dedicated, publicly routable IP addresses to event sponsors.

Need: Replace an aging Fujitsu telephone system offering an improved guest experience with a new generation of guest voice messaging and improved wake up calls. The system had to interface with the Starwood property management system.

Solution: Avaya IP Office 412 with Analog Gateways from Ipanema Solutions LLC. The solution provides 30 VoIP telephones for the front desk, restaurant and administrative and sales offices. Media gateways provide support for an additional 450 analog devices in the guest rooms and future support for VoIP SIP/H.323 based guest room phones.

Benefits: The new system supports direct room access via dedicated Direct Inward Dial numbers for each guest room. This allows callers contacting guests to by-pass the front desk.

The system provides guests the ability to set single or multiple wake-up calls from their room phone through Interactive Voice Response (IVR).

The system provides the ability to account for and analyze all calls within the hotel, including calls from non-guest room phones.

The system supports a new generation of color LCD screen phones by Teledex that may be added to executive suites in the future.

Vendors: Ipanema Solutions / Avaya IP Office and IP Office Gateways
IP3 Networks Hospitality Portal Server
SonicWall VPN/Firewall/Bandwidth Management Software
Cisco Linksys POE Switches and Wireless Access Points
Microsoft Exchange 2003 Messaging Server
2020 Communications 6MB Internet Feed