Village Hotel Club

Overview

The newly rebranded Village Hotel Club recently underwent a refurbishment throughout their 28 UK locations in order to provide their guests with the highest possible standards in hospitality. At the core of this refresh was the creation of a high-performance network infrastructure to support business needs, as well as new and enhanced guest services.

Dan Morley, Head of IT Infrastructure at Village Hotel Club, needed a robust network that would support the distributed sites. The solution needed to provide unified management and centralized visibility, improve the level of support the IT team could provide, enable the business to adapt to the ever diversifying demands of technology, and ultimately create a unique and engaging environment for guests. With Cisco Meraki, fully integrated and intuitive cloud-managed platform, Dan was able to meet and exceed those requirements.

Original Networking Challenges

• The previous network could support basic needs, but it was ill-equipped for handling the requirements of the newly launched services and future plans.
• Standardization and consistent management across the different sites was difficult, leading to varying levels of performance and the inability to support the newly launched offerings.

The highly adaptable Meraki cloud Wi-Fi solution enables me to quickly react and fulfill both business and client demands of this fast-evolving, always-connected society we work in.

Dan Morley

Head of IT Infrastructure

Why Cisco Meraki

• Providing a secure solution across all 28 hotels that could be managed remotely through a single web-based dashboard was a key factor for Village Hotel Club and its IT team.
• The IT team ran a pilot program at 3 of the locations and quickly found that the Meraki solution fulfilled all of their needs and performed above expectations.
• The ability to broadcast up to 15 SSIDs per network, and on each device, allows the IT team to provide segmented business and guest access without installing additional devices, reducing cost and management overhead.
• Centralised management throughout the nationwide deployment provides visibility into users, devices, and applications on each hotel network, as well as detailed control of the APs and switches.

The Deployment

• Working with trusted partners, Village Hotel Club deployed a mixture of 802.11n and 802.11ac access points as needed, based on site surveys and the planned usage of the hotels, creating an installation plan to provide optimal performance.
• A series of Meraki access switches deployed at each location provide the connection point for the Meraki APs. Using virtual stacking, the IT team can manage any number of individual distributed ports in aggregate.
• Village Hotel Club’s technology partner assisted in configuring each of the APs and switches, creating standardised policies across all of the locations.
• With up to 15 SSIDs, different configurations can be set to allow access to certain applications, while blocking or simply limiting bandwidth available to others. The IT team can even customise landing pages and how users authenticate to the network.
• Group policies give the IT team the ability to make customised rules on a per-user or per-group level, allowing the team to quickly adapt the network to the needs of employees, guests, or event groups.

Results

• Customers are now able to take full advantage of the various services at the hotels without any disruption, including self-service check-in, smart fitness suites, business conference centers, high performance online access, streaming video in rooms or public areas, and more.
• In the event an update needs to be made, the Village Hotel Club IT team has the ability to tweak settings in the Meraki dashboard, while their trusted service provider can quickly perform configuration changes remotely from a central operations center.
• In addition to enhanced guest services, employees are also benefitting from the upgraded network with new mobile payment terminals and wireless PDQ systems.
• Previously, the Meetings and Events team had to make the best of the permissions that were given to them. Now they have the ability to adjust bandwidth allotments for each type of space at each hotel location.
• Built-in alerts automatically notify the team of potential issues, so they can proactively find a resolution before receiving complaints.