INTERNATIONAL REPORT—When Don O’Neal tried to access the Internet from a Washington, D.C.-area hotel during a recent stay, he couldn’t get a signal. It’s not that the systems weren’t functioning properly at the upper-upscale property at which he stayed; they were simply overwhelmed by 95-percent occupancy crowds drawn to the city for the Presidential Inauguration of Barack Obama.
“There’s simply a point where you max out the capability of the bandwidth that’s coming into the property,” said O’Neal, who also serves as president of O’Neal Consultants, a firm specializing in hotel technology and Internet systems. “It slows down to a point where it degrades your service.”
During the best of times, such connectivity failures are problematic. When times are worse—say, when the industry is reeling from the effects of a global economic recession—they can be downright detrimental, deterring demand from value-conscious travelers. O’Neal, who admitted he’s unlikely to visit that D.C.-area hotel in the future, said he knows a number of other hotels that have lost corporate contracts because they failed to provide adequate Internet service.
So how does a hotelier stay afloat as guests demand more and more while they surf the Web? Unfortunately, “there’s not one answer to Internet problems within a hotel,” O’Neal said.
Traffic logjams
If hoteliers could spread Internet usage over the course of a 24-hour day, guests could likely download files or stream movies without delay. But like a major metropolitan thoroughfare, the majority of traffic occurs within small windows of time, creating logjams that slow progress to a lurching halt.
“It’s every time between six in the morning and nine in the morning, when everybody is waking up and checking their e-mail, and then 5 o’clock to 10 o’clock at night,” said Gustaaf Schrils, VP of global technology for the Americas at InterContinental Hotels Group. “It’s an incredible amount of usage in a very compressed time.”
Most Internet providers today don’t charge on a usage basis, however. “This kind of (commercial) bandwidth is not something you can turn on and off with occupancy,” Schrils said, and buying enough to satisfy just a few high-volume hours each day can be incredibly expensive.
To help manage costs, IHG is currently developing a program that would allow its hotels to get bandwidth on demand, thus charging them only for the bandwidth that is required to satisfy demand during any particular period, he said.
Vineet Gupta has overseen a similar, albeit less dynamic, process at Fairmont Hotels & Resorts. In anticipation of conferences and other large group bookings, the brand’s VP of technology said IT staff at a given property will simply call the local cable company and have them increase the bandwidth for a particular period of time.
In addition to varying the amount of bandwidth used, hoteliers can also manage how a set amount of bandwidth is used. According to Schrils, a server can take the amount of bandwidth available and evenly split it among the rooms so that one guest doesn’t hog more than his or her fair share.
Another way to manage how it is used is through traffic filtering. Because some Web sites, especially adult-oriented sites, are incredibly bandwidth-intensive, a hotel can “make it extremely difficult to get to those sites” through disclaimer pages that require the proper antivirus software, firewalls and spamware, Schrils said. “We want to help protect the customer’s PC and also make sure we use bandwidth as efficiently and effectively as possible.”
To complement these back-end solutions, hotels are beginning to experiment with the front-end method of allowing guests to pay for varying speeds of Internet. One guest may choose to tolerate a slow, 56K connection for free, while another may be willing to pay a daily fee for a higher speed.
IHG has experimented with the technology throughout its portfolio with good results, but Schrils said there are marketing concerns that must first be considered before rolling it out as a brand standard. “When you do that, it’s very difficult to have the marketing campaign say you have free Internet,” he said.
Poor design
When he was consulting for a resort in Utah, O’Neal received a call from the property’s director of IT. Guests at the resort were having trouble maintaining a wireless connection, the director said, and he wanted some advice.
“One of the things I suggested was to go in and do a signal test in every one of the rooms to see what signal strength you could get regardless of demand. … Then do it again when you’ve got a full house,” he said.
“It’s a very involved process … to get (wireless Internet) right. Consequently, the properties that I have seen that do the best job are those that overdesign for the expectation.”
All too often, a property’s Internet system is not designed to provide adequate, let alone more than adequate, connectivity to guests, O’Neal said. Too few wireless access points are put on a given floor. There’s not enough thought as to how different building materials (e.g. metal support beams, concrete walls between access points) will affect the connection. And some technologies, such as guestroom telephones, can draw from the total allotted bandwidth unbeknownst to a hotel owner.
When combined, these elements and more can render an Internet system useless.
“It has to do with design, and people just don’t pay enough attention it, or else they just don’t know to do so,” O’Neal said. “It’s a major issue in the industry.”
The majority of design problems plague wireless systems. As such, O’Neal said “a wired connection is always a better option.” But because wired systems are more expensive, especially when it involves recabling an existing property, more and more hotels are switching to the wireless alternative.
The majority of properties in Fairmont’s portfolio are wired, for example, but within the next one or two years, all guestrooms will be wireless, according to Gupta.
To design a successful wireless system, O’Neal said hoteliers must use commercial-grade access points that can handle multiple users at the same time. Then, they must be positioned to satisfy the number of rooms they’re capable of serving.
Depending on how much an owner wants to spend, O’Neal recommends having one access point for every two rooms or even one in every room closet—not one in a hallway closet to handle the entire floor.
“They’re only designed to handle a certain number of connections at a time,” O’Neal said. “If you don’t have enough wireless access points to support the demand, (guests will) be knocked off.”
Lack of foresight
Bandwidth demand has increased exponentially during the last few years, and the trend is likely to continue in the future. As such, new-builds should be designed with the capability of expanding Internet offerings in the future.
“When we build a building, we’re not building it for the next five years,” Schrils said. “We’re building it for the next thirty years.” IHG properties are designed to facilitate wireless systems and are equipped with enough cat-5 cable to exceed demand today and anticipate future wired demand.
Gupta said that given the rapid technological advancements in Internet systems, Fairmont only looks “five to ten years down the road. Beyond that, the only way you attack this is by buying more bandwidth. The cost of bandwidth is going down, so we’re not too worried about it.