The grand slam of user experience

The town of Båstad on the Bjäre Peninsula, nicknamed ‘the Tuscany of Sweden’ after its hilly landscape, contrasting with the otherwise flat surroundings, is one of the country’s most typical summer resorts. Upon realizing the potential of the region, Ludvig Nobel (Alfred’s older brother) started the transformation of Båstad into a tourist destination. To give more people the opportunity to enjoy the beauty of this place, new hotels, tennis courts and golf courses began popping up since the beginning of 20th century. Among them was the building better known today as Hotel Skansen.

Hotel Skansen in Båstad, part of the GRAM Group (short for Great Ambiance Hotels), is a modern, four-star resort which traces its roots back to the early 1900’s. Well-known for its luxurious spa, a signature cold bath house, the renowned Restaurant Sand, and last but not least, high-profile tennis court facilities, the complex has hosted the Swedish Open tournament each summer since 1948, along with some true legends of the Swedish sport like Björn Borg, Mats Wilander and Stefan Edberg.

A hub of activity in the summer, a relaxing retreat in the winter, in Hotel Skansen you will find equal parts historical atmosphere and today’s technology. Whether you prefer to relax in the historic portion of the facility or enjoy the modern feel of the Tennis Pavilion and Congress Building, hotel guests always want a reliable, high-speed connectivity and convenient access to digital services. To cater to those needs, Hotel Skansen required a more robust and efficient networking solution.

“In the modern world of digitalization, our hotels and tennis courts needed a new IT infrastructure in place to support the increasing bandwidth growth from both our guests and the new IT solutions. To be able do that we contacted our long term IT partner, Xite”, Marina Olmarker, the CEO of Hotel Skansen in Båstad explains.

“We have been working with GRAM Group since as early as 2004, providing all IT infrastructure projects for the back-office, guest hospitality and restaurants. This time around, the customer needed a secure network and Wi-Fi infrastructure that could handle all new digital platforms and systems for both guests and employees, including signage and POS terminals, among other things”, adds Rickard Sellstedt, Senior Network and Security Consultant at Xite.

The most challenging part of the project was to provide all 172 rooms of the hotel spread over three separate buildings, along with the secluded villas and studios, common areas, the restaurant, as well as the large conference center consisting of 26 various meeting rooms, with a new wireless infrastructure that would enable better network capacity, bandwidth and coverage. When the hotel is fully booked, it means 330 active users, excluding staff. If various product launches, congresses, trade fairs, shows and parties are taking place, that number goes well above 500. Much more when there are tennis tournaments in play.

In order to enhance throughput-per-area in high-density scenarios such as these, the customer decided to take advantage of Wi-Fi 6 – the next generation of wireless. Relying on their extensive knowledge and experience with Extreme Networks technology, Rickard Sellstedt and his colleagues from Xite recommended the well-proven AP410C access points.

“Extreme access points provide everything that is needed to get the job done: high-efficiency, high-performance 802.11ax aggregate data rates up to 4.8 Gbps in the 5 GHz band and concurrent 574 Mbps in the 2.4 GHz band, coupled with adaptive radio frequency management with AI/ML functionality that provides intelligent selection of the best channels and transmit power for an optimal user experience” Rickard Sellstedt explains.

To further increase user experience and satisfaction level, Xite also implemented the Bluecom Enterprise Portal, a flexible and customizable onboarding solution that not only provides guests and employees of Hotel Skansen with easy and secure access to the wireless network, but also enables collecting, analyzing and distributing information to the users, thus laying foundation for increasing customer loyalty and, ultimately, driving higher revenue per available room.

“With a customized landing page, the hotel can communicate with its guests directly by sending personalized messages at certain locations, ask for preferences, create offers or simply collect data that can be used to further enhance their experience – for example by optimizing signage systems based on the users’ movement”, says Rickard Sellstedt.

This unique combination of hardware and software yields visible results, best manifested in the overall customer satisfaction. On its Booking.com page, Hotel Skansen scores 8.8 out of 10 in the “Free WiFi” category, which is the second highest-rated element, after its spectacular location on the Bjäre Peninsula (9.3 out of 10; rates based on 608 reviews, as of June 2023).

“I am very satisfied both with Xite and their communication and accuracy towards us as a customer, and the quality of the Extreme Networks products. With this modern solution in place, our daily work is easier and our guests can enjoy their stay to the fullest. We have been satisfied from the very start of the project, throughout the whole process of delivery, up to the final implementation and daily usage”, says Marcus Thuresson, CEO of GRAM Group.

The AP410C universal platforms from Extreme are the first generation of access points to run multiple operating systems, providing flexibility and choice between on-premise or cloud deployment. To reduce IT operating costs, Hotel Skansen chose to go with the latter. As part of the partnership with GRAM Group, Xite is managing the customer’s networks with the help of the industry-leading ExtremeCloud IQ platform – a solution that streamlines every aspect of the network, from deployment to daily maintenance.

What’s also worth noting, designed for high density environments like the one at Hotel Skansen, AP410C is powerful enough and smart enough to provide the highest level of client services without compromising security monitoring. Thanks to ExtremeCloud IQ, network administrators can get the complete performance, health, and security picture of every user and device in, around, and part of the hotel’s network. All that, coupled with best design practices employed by Xite, makes this particular environment extraordinarily efficient and secure.

“Together with Extreme, we have delivered a robust solution that is secured with Enterprise Portal, zero trust approach and micro-segmentation that separates network traffic for individual groups of users and devices. On top of that, all hotels of the GRAM Group are connected via an SD-WAN network to be able to deliver a robust and flexible environment more efficiently and cost-effectively. Using tennis terminology, the delivered solution was not a mere tie-breaker, but a grand slam!”, Rickard Sellstedt sums up.

Xite, now part of Office Management, is the Extreme Network Diamond Partner and a full IT-Service company specialized in the design, implementation, operation and maintenance of complete IT infrastructure. Xite’s consultants, who boast extensive experience in IT and cutting-edge expertise in one or more areas, have designed and built some of the largest Extreme Networks deployments in the world in the past 15 years. The list of the company’s customers includes mainly large and medium-sized companies located in the Stockholm and Uppsala regions.