1) Review your voice and Internet services
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.
