Hotel Grand Chancellor Christchurch
The Hotel Grand Chancellor has 186 guest rooms with the largest conference area in the South Island. With a large corporate client base the Hotel Grand Chancellor realised that without an in-room guest broadband it wasn’t catering for their client’s needs.
Vistagate conducted a site survey and found that rooms were CAT5e cabled to the bedside table phone. The desk was on the opposite wall making this outlet unusable. During the installation assessment it was identified that a cable route was possible with minimal disruption to exposed walls, ceilings or furniture.
Proposals for both a cable or wireless solution were prepared and the decision to cable the guest rooms was made.
Vistagate then project managed and installed 186 dual outlets into all of the guest rooms as well as network switches on each floor of the building. In addition to the dual outlet, Vistagate also provided retractable network leads. All labels and signs were printed and prepared by Vistagate with Hotel Grand Chancellor branding.
Guests simply connect the retractable network lead in their room to their laptop, opening their web browser (which is tailored to the Grand Chancellor Hotel branding), selecting the pricing plan and accepting the terms and conditions. They can then access the Internet.
Another benefit for guests is that they can enable a wireless account and use their laptop within the hotel’s wireless environment at no additional charge. All charges are then posted to the guest room account.
In the conference and hotel lobby areas wireless access points were deployed providing a complete wireless coverage throughout the conference floor and hotel lobby reception using power over ethernet technology.
Several outlets per meeting and conference room were also enabled for network connectivity to the Vistagate guest network. This enables a conference staff member to use a web browser interface to create conference usernames and passwords for authentication.
This gives the conference the ability to use several devices on a single account, with customised conference rates.
Alternatively staff can sell pre-paid cards for users who just want access for an hour, half day or full day. The cards can be purchased at reception or via the conference team.
All rooms have a billing interface with the hotel’s property management and reservations system for charging to be posted directly to the guest’s account.
The Hotel Grand Chancellor has the ability to change charge rates. They currently promote an Internet access charge with a traffic cap and excess charging for daily and hourly rates.