New hotel operator, new house rules. An IT perspective

When we took over the IT management at Parkhotel in the year 2013, it was clear that there wouldn’t be a big bang investment to replace the necessary equipment all in one go. IT is always a budget sensitive topic in hospitality so we had to adapt the renewal process to meet the conditions.

We set ourselves two main goals and prepared a detailed investment plan designed to achieve the greatest possible effect.

• Where can we make savings for the customer?
  
• Can IT make the hotel more competitive?
  

Gradually we started to implement our plan and after 2 years the client could already see a significant improvement.

Focus on saving money; business info comes as a bonus

One of the main places to save in a hotel where a lot of calls are made is the telephone service. We have experience in negotiating with telephone operators and therefore are able to negotiate favourable terms for our clients.
With the new contract, Parkhotel not only received money for every incoming call, but also got a whole load of caller statistics and valuable business data to work with.

Guest satisfaction is the measure

After two years, our IT plan, based on Parkhotel’s priorities and what needed most urgent attention began to bear fruit. And guests noticed that and the hotel began to rank among the best hotels on booking.com. The WiFi network is still rated as excellent.

And the ownership change that was coming just built further on these good foundations. We had no idea then, though, just how big the change would be!

New owner, new rules

In July 2017, the hotel changed ownership. Parkhotel Praha became the first Czech link in the family hotel chain Mama Shelter, who brought their revolutionary concept of hotel services to the Czech Republic.

In addition to the creative atmosphere, unusual design and informal approach, one of the main features of their new approach is the availability of the latest technologies.

Networking and standardization

From an IT management point of view, it was clear from day one that we needed to keep separate the parent company’s and actual hotel operator’s networks. The employee network and everything concerning the clients, the mail server, etc. needed to be kept under Accor; all property-related technologies - room keys, cameras, A/V, IPTV (direct streams) would be managed independently.

The biggest problem was the different standards followed by each of the entities involved. For example, what network protocol to adopt for connecting video devices together. Of course, this applies not only to CCTV, but also to hardware and software. Another challenge came with the Payment Card Industry Security Standard - the set of security standards that aims to secure credit and debit card transactions against data theft and fraud. Accor is PCI DSS compliant and therefore must restrict access to cardholder data and monitor access to network resources; that means installation of firewalls, encryption of data transmissions and use of anti-virus software.

In order for everything to work according to the new rules, it was also necessary to carry out some major building works which would affect operations. The situation was complicated by the hotel’s listed building status which limited what could be done to the building. Parts of which could not be touched at all.

The whole project - one step at a time

The headache for every new operator entering a new market or country is that everything is exactly that - new! It usually takes a long time to find out all the necessary information about the property itself, the current suppliers and other options in the market.

And it goes without saying that when you are renovating an operational building, time is against you.

The Accor project team initially engaged several contractors to carry out the changes but they struggled to make much headway mainly due to their lack of specific site knowledge and the complexity of working during a massive renovation project which touched almost every part of the building.

We, as IT administrators, were not initially involved in the acquisition and migration project. Gradually, however, the client began to contact us with more and more requests. Thanks to the fact that we had been maintaining the clients IT for a number of years, we knew the setup well, so we took on individual tasks in an emergency call out capacity until we eventually took over the whole project.

Benefits for the client

The advantage of long-term cooperation is the knowledge that it gives you and that in turn allows you to respond faster to requests. We know where the cables can reach, we know where the cameras can be placed and where there were problems previously; we’ve built relationships with the local team.

In addition to that, being proactive is in our DNA, so even though we were not originally appointed to implement the project, we were able to help our long-term client get through the difficult times especially when the appointed supplier failed to respond or didn’t know what to do.