We’ve all been there – having settled down in a hotel ready to send off some important emails, only to be let down by slow, erratic or even non-existent hotel WiFi. Thanks to the increasing ubiquity of WiFi services within the hospitality industry, and our ever more connected lives, offering high-functioning hotel WiFi to customers is now an absolute must.
Hotel WiFi is used by guests for a whole range of reasons including connecting with friends, catching up with their favourite television programmes or, particularly for those on business trips, sending off vital pieces of work or information. In other words, poor hotel WiFi can be disruptive to your guests and will reflect badly on your business. Technologically savvy hoteliers will know that establishing a strong hotel wireless network from a qualified service provider that features decent managed service will ensure guests are able to connect swiftly and easily.
The following are a few more reasons to convince you that investing in strong and reliable WiFi may prove to be one of your best business decisions yet:
Dodgy hotel WiFi can cost the business precious time
Having WiFi that cuts out regularly or is difficult to set up will be disruptive to hoteliers, as guests will constantly be asking for technological help. Dealing with these questions may cost the business precious time that could be channelled into something more productive.
Be wary of Trip Advisor
Users of online review sites are more likely to hone in on the negative aspects of a business than the positive ones, and poor hotel WiFi may be one of the first things guests notice. Foreclose the possibility of bad reviews by getting your WiFi up to scratch from the outset.
Satisfied customers will be regularly customers
Poor hotel WiFi may be enough to put clients off returning, even if everything else about their stay was top notch.
WiFi is necessary for events
If your hotel is one that hosts business conferences or other WiFi-reliant events, establishing a strong and efficient network is absolutely necessary. In fact, once you established strong WiFi within your building, you can use it as a selling point when advertising your services to potential clients.
Having set out the main reasons why hotel WiFi is essential to the successful running of the business, it is also important to stress the need for a secure network. Without a secure connection, guests and visitors could find themselves accessing questionable material online or becoming victim to malware or cyber hacking. To make sure your connection is secure:
Separate your internal network from the guest network
Use a firewall or establish a separate VLAN to keep the networks secure and separate.
Update your firmware
This should be done every few months or so to protect you and your guests from the latest malware.
Make sure wireless signals are encrypted
Encrypt your network with WPA2 encryption to prevent hackers from spying on your guests. If you change the name of your SSID from the outset to reflect the name of your business and make sure a secure password is set up, this should not make logging on any more difficult for guests.
Block content to compromising material
While guests may want to use your hotel WiFi for material that is ethically or legally questionable, it is your right to prevent them from doing so. Make sure you include stringent content blocks before opening the network up to your guests.
To find out more about setting up a secure WiFi network in your hotel, get in touch with Redway Networks today.
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Conference attendees will judge the success of an event and, therefore, the reputation of your venue on how easily they were able to connect to the internet. They expect to connect as easily as they do at home or at work, but that represents a problem for many conference Facility Managers. But is there a solution?
The problems with current conference centre wireless networks
How do you provide a wireless network that can scale up and down depending on the event being hosted? For long periods of time, your wi-fi network may go largely unused, and then, just a day later, it may have to cater for thousands of exhibitors, concert goers or attendees. Some events may be concentrated in a small area, whereas others may be spread out across your venue.
Traditionally, getting the balance right has been tough. The choices are between having an over-engineered, expensive wireless behemoth that you have to be able to justify spending money on and having a weak wi-fi provision that only causes problems and attracts complaints as it gets continually stretched beyond its operational limit.
However, there is a solution that allows you to successfully deploy a wireless network in your conference centre.
Aerohive and how it works to solve conference centre wireless problems
When it comes to planning a conference event that requires wi-fi, there are many questions you need to answer: how many access points will you need? Where are they going to be used most? Where are the dead points in the building? How will attendees be moving through the facility? Activity in a conference is difficult to predict, and so this kind of high-density WAN planning can be complex.
Aerohive is a system that helps you solve all these issues. It is a self-healing, self-organising system that reduces your operational cost, cuts down on the complexity and gives you real-time control from anywhere, via its cloud-managed tool HiveManager NG. Aerohive is flexible and adaptable and is a perfect enterprise wi-fi solution for conference centres.
Aerohive access points give you a high capacity provision and also come with built-in BLE technology that provides data on proximity, location tracking, and location-based engagement. This data is fed back into the HiveManager NG cloud tool, providing you with an accurate picture of your network’s health and performance.
What’s more, Aerohive can unify wired and wireless connections, so you can streamline and configure workflows, and it also gives you planning tools, so you can get things right, before an event begins.
If you want to make deploying your conference centre wireless network easier, get in touch about our range of Aerohive products and wireless site survey services.
If you are a hospitality service provider, it may be about time to consider taking your networking and wireless communications potential to the next level. As a hospitality service provider, your business needs to be at the cutting edge of the action, and installing a state-of-the-art hospitality WiFi will put your communications and data access right where they need to be.
Cloud-based Hospitality WiFi
The hospitality industry is constantly on the lookout for new clients and new experiences they can offer those customers. Making best use of WiFi and cloud computing can make that task so much easier. Having mobile access to data and software in the cloud means that any personnel you authorise can have immediate access to information or can update files from their PCs, laptops or mobile devices anywhere they have internet connectivity.
Embrace the new mobile era
Finding the right product to facilitate this flexibility and efficiency is, of course, all important. As a hospitality service company, you need a scalable cloud networking platform that fits hand in glove with the new mobile era and that enhances the user experience of anyone connecting via the product.
By choosing a good cloud-based service enterprise management solution, you can get all of the features and functions of a network management system that sits behind a firewall, but without any of the additional hassle of installing on a dedicated conventional server. You can avoid any associated installation issues, any operational and maintenance concerns and hefty installation charges.
The right cloud-based enterprise solution
The right online solution of a cloud-based enterprise system will provide ease of management, great flexibility as well as redundancy. You will have the benefit of a hospitality WiFi platform that can be scaled up with consummate ease.
Hospitality service providers are notoriously protective of their client list and the information they hold in their databases – and with just cause too. If this information gets hacked, it can cause a substantial loss of business, so it’s important to ensure that the hospitality WiFi platform you choose is secure.
Because of this, when you are researching the right product for you, look out for a system that incorporates PPSK (Private Pre-Shared Key) technology backed up with granular dynamic policy enforcement.