1. Reduce your voice trunking capacity on your phone systems. We find existing hotels oversubscribed by an average of 50% on voice trunks. Did you know that a single phone line that is eliminated will save on average $2,400 over 5 years? A typical 200 room hotel may need as few as 12 channels on a PRI plus three to five analog trunks for fire panels, elevators and emergency backups.
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.
