The Swiss Spirit Hotel is a 4-star hotel located in the Al Safaha Business District in the heart of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The hotel offers 80 guest rooms across 17 floors as well as a business center and restaurant. It is frequented by travelers and business-people thanks to its convenient location in the center of one of Riyadh’s most popular neighborhoods.
A State-of-the-Art Communications Network Integrated with a Property Management System
In order to offer the high-end customer service expected from a 4-star hotel, the Swiss Spirit Hotel needed their communication solution to support more advanced calling and routing features to enable them to handle all internal and external calls as well as customer and guest requests. Finally, the hotel was looking to utilize a Property Management System (PMS) in order to streamline all hotel management processes, including billing, check-in, check-out, room service, mini bar services, and more. The Hotel was looking for a modern, reliable, and scalable communications platform that would support all of those needs, and they reached out to a local system integrator, Asian Telecom, to help.
After evaluating many different possible options, The Swiss Spirit Hotel selected a Grandstream unified communications solution, which was recommended to them and designed by Asian Telecom. The entire solution was anchored by Grandstream’s UCM series of IP PBXs, which offers a license-free IP PBX that can be easily expanded, supports enterprise-grade communication features, and offers the ability to integrate video communications as well as data and mobility tools.
Grandstream’s UCM series IP PBX
In terms of voice features, the hotel had three major requirements which were met by the UCM series. First, they needed to expand the reach of the reception department and front desk operations to be able to efficiently handle guests requests as well as new reservations. This was done by implementing an advanced call queue that allowed the hotel to serve every caller at the moment they called the hotel. Secondly, the hotel wanted to streamline the experience of those calling in to make or check on reservations. This was done by implementing a call queue with various IVRs and auto-attendants that offer immediate self-service options.
Thirdly, and maybe most importantly, the Swiss Spirit Hotel was looking to deploy a hospitality management service, also known as a property management system. These software-based platforms allow hotels to streamline hotel management, including check-in, check-out, billing, phone usage, minibar service, and more. The Hotel selected one of the most popular hospitality management services on the market, Oracle’s Opera platform. Oracle Opera was integrated with the UCM series through HMobile’s Property Management system, which is fully supported by the UCM series. This allows the hotel to integrate their communications platform with their management platform, therefore enabling staff to use phones around the hotel to feed information back into the management platform, and for the management platform to integrate data from the communication platform. For example, cleaning staff can use the phones in each room to tell the management platform that items from the minibar were used, which automatically adds those items to the guests’ bill. Staff can use the phone system to report that a room was cleaned. Also, calls made from guest rooms or room service orders can be automatically added to that guests’ bill. The UCM series integration with Opera also allows for a variety of other management functions.
Grandstream IP Phones
Not only was the hotel updating its back-end communications and management platform, but it also needed sleek, attractive new phones for hotel staff and guest rooms. At the advice of Asian Telecom, the Swiss Spirit Hotel chose Grandstream’s GXP1630 for all guest rooms and the GXP2130 for hotel staff areas including the front desk and main office.
For guest rooms, the GXP1630 offers a sleek, attractive IP phone with a streamlined footprint and easy-to-use interface. It offers 8-speed dial hard keys which were programmed to offer dedicated buttons to directly call the front desk, concierge, laundry, restaurant, room service, housekeeping, café, and emergency services. The GXP2130, a high-end 3-line IP phone, was chosen for hotel staff. This powerful IP phone offers HD audio to ensure crystal-clear voice quality, a color-screen operating system to make the device easy to use and a compact desktop footprint to keep employee workspaces clean. This attractive model also gives a great impression to visitors.
The Result
Thanks to Asian Telecom and Grandstream, the Swiss Spirit Hotel was able to build the modern, scalable, and integrated communication and management solution they need to improve hotel operations and guest services. They are able to support more efficient communications between guests and management, better service to external callers, offer guests easy access to the services they need and they are able to integrate their communications and management platforms to share information.
Learn more about Grandstream's hospitalities solutions in our blog post!
