Extreme Networks in Hospitality: driving operational excellence and delivering guest experiences that wow

16 June 2023

When you’re in a hospitality business, saying “be my guest!” is not enough to get customers rushing through the doors. So today we’re taking a quick tour around a couple of high-profile hotels in Europe to find out how our high-performing, flexible and secure solutions create competitive edge and simplify network complexities!

Hotels, holiday resorts and other hospitality properties are facing a number of challenges every day, all in the name of delivering a quality guest experience and – by extension – maintaining a steady revenue stream. One of these challenges is meeting the expectations of highly-connected guests.

Let’s face it: increased smartphone, tablet, and PC use means expectations of fast Wi-Fi has now become a demand. In fact, providing a high-speed wireless connectivity that guests expect (and your staff needs to provide superior service) can make all the difference between keeping a customer and losing one. According to Hotel Chatter, as much as 94% of guests cite Wi-Fi as the most important amenity. 38% of those say that no Wi-Fi is a deal-breaker and will book elsewhere.

The most important thing is that our guests have the best possible experience when they stay with us, which includes their experience using any guest-facing technology we provide (...)

Claire Van Campen, General Manager, Hard Rock Hotel Amsterdam American (The Netherlands)

Wi-Fi 6: today’s standard for a good network capacity, bandwidth, and coverage

Modern hotels understand well enough that enabling exceptional service, personalized experiences, and a comfortable environment is essential to maintaining customer loyalty and attracting new guests. However, as many hospitality professionals have experienced it first-hand, providing guests and staff with reliable and high-speed connectivity across the entire hotel or venue, enabling them to stay connected wherever they are, is rarely a walk in the park.

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 (…)

Marina Olmarker, CEO, Hotel Skansen Båstad (Sweden)

With hotel environments, the keyword is “density”. For example, when Hotel Skansen is fully booked, it means 330 active users, and that’s without staff. If some conferences, business meetings or sports events are taking place, that number greatly exceeds 500. In order to address the growing number of users and devices, both Hard Rock Hotel Amsterdam American and Hotel Skansen Båstad decided to increase their network capacity, bandwidth and coverage. This has led both businesses to deploy reliable, high-performing solutions from Extreme Networks. In both cases, Extreme’s high-density Wi-Fi 6 solutions have delivered faster speeds and improved network capacity, providing powerful wireless coverage and reduced network congestion.

The effect? High-efficiency, high-performance Wi-Fi 6 access points, equipped with adaptive radio frequency management and AI/ML functionalities that provide intelligent selection of the best channels, enabled great user experience.

The proof? On its Booking.com page, Hotel Skansen Båstad scores 8.8 out of 10 in the “Free WiFi” category, which is the second highest-rated element, after its location (9.3 out of 10; rates based on 607 reviews, as of June 2023). For Hard Rock Hotel Amsterdam American, the new solution allowed the deployment of modern, contactless services such as guest registration, in-room dining requests, remote check-outs or coordinated housekeeping. Moreover, the customer has experienced a significant reduction in the number of helpdesk tickets related to Wi-Fi connectivity issues.

(…) With Extreme, our guests now have access to seamless Wi-Fi connectivity across the entire hotel so they can stay connected with family, friends, or work.

Claire Van Campen, General Manager, Hard Rock Hotel Amsterdam American (The Netherlands)

Wi-Fi 6E: next generation of wireless for the most congested and challenging environments

The challenges related to network capacity and bandwidth are even more tangible for larger and more business-oriented environments. Boasting 262 guest rooms and 14 meeting rooms, the Crowne Plaza Antwerpen stands as one of the biggest hotels in the most populated area in Belgium. Due to its unique location just south of the city center, only 30 minutes west of Brussels Airport, it is also a top choice for various conferences and business meetings.

We were experiencing growing problems with our hotspots – they simply couldn't take the full load of the growing number of guest connections, often from more than one wireless device, not to mention the IPTV connected to the hotspots. In time, we were getting more and more complaints from the guests (...)

Luc Westerlinck, Chief Engineer & Safety Advisor, Crowne Plaza Antwerpen Hotel (Belgium)

To provide secure, high-capacity and high-speed connectivity, creating a foundation to roll out innovative customer experiences such as touchless check in/out, video streaming, and voice activated technology services, the hotel invested in the 6 GHz connectivity through the latest generation of wireless technology: Wi-Fi 6E. As such, all guest and conference rooms have been equipped with Extreme AP4000 access points, recognized with several industry accolades like the Wi-Fi Awards 2022 Product of the Year by Wireless LAN Professionals or 2021 Wi-Fi at Work Award for Extreme’s deployment of Wi-Fi 6E at Novant Health.

The deployed devices combine powerful 802.11ax technology, advanced security and ML/AI management capabilities together into an enterprise-class solution that reduced network congestion, eliminated latency and provided the ability for simultaneous multi-user communication, allowing the highly congested network environment at the Crowne Plaza Antwerpen to deploy high-speed, high-capacity and highly secure wireless network.

(…) Wi-Fi 6E has provided us with secure, high-performing connectivity to drive efficient hotel operations and memorable guest experiences (…) We’ve seen first-hand that the network performs flawlessly during the peak time, proving that the solution ensures more uptime time and greater stability, even in the most arduous of circumstances.

Luc Westerlinck, Chief Engineer & Safety Advisor, Crowne Plaza Antwerpen Hotel (Belgium)

Increase your knowledge of Wi-Fi:

Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E: all you need to know

Wi-Fi 5 / 6 / 6E / 802.11an / 802.11ax… Ever wondered what all that technical jargon actually means? Let's take a quick look at the latest generation of Wi-Fi and why it's perfect for your organization!

ExtremeCloud IQ: one platform to manage it all

The fact that hotel guests always want a reliable, high-speed connectivity and convenient access to digital services, is very much clear. However, hotel managers are constantly looking for new ways to drive efficiencies, optimize operations, reduce costs, and leverage analytical data to deliver even better business outcomes. All of these goals can be achieved through cloud-managed networking.

And when it comes to cloud-managed networking, Extreme is always a safe bet.

ExtremeCloud IQ, a core component of Extreme’s ‘One Cloud, One Network’ philosophy, supports access points, switches and SD-WAN, providing unified management of the entire environment. It combines intuitive configuration workflows, real-time and historical monitoring, comprehensive troubleshooting capabilities, and integrated network applications – all in one, elegant solution. With ExtremeCloud IQ, IT professionals gain a single-pane-of-glass, dashboard that provides complete performance, health, and security picture of every user and device in, around, and part of their hotel’s network.

The new solution has (…) greatly simplified network management, reducing stress for our IT team.

Claire Van Campen, General Manager, Hard Rock Hotel Amsterdam American (The Netherlands)

Learn more about cloud networking:

The scalability and flexibility to drive better efficiencies and cost savings

ExtremeCloud IQ also greatly simplifies the process of deploying, scaling, managing, and maintaining network devices, reducing the number of IT man-hours. With this solution, adding new access points to the network is quick, easy and essentially fail-proof – a feature that is key in dynamically expanding environments. Imagine that your resort needs to add 50, 100 or even 200 new access points. The time and resources needed to manage them all will be virtually the same.

The opening of the second stage of our hotel investment in Łeba is scheduled for July 1, 2023. Although the building’s characteristic is a little bit different, we wanted it to share the same quality and approach towards our guests – this is why we are investing in the best networking solutions on the market, following the best industry practices.

Anna Blachowska, PR and Marketing Director, Saltic Resort & SPA Łeba (Poland)

What’s also very important in this business, the solution supports remote network management, allowing small IT teams or individuals to react quickly to network demands or potential problems, without having to physically attend to each access point, thus eliminating the need for expensive truck rolls.

Earlier we would receive calls at odd hours like 3:00 AM, saying there’s a problem with the Internet (…) Now we can simply pick up the phone, go to the cloud connection and quickly verify if the problem has anything to do with the network. ExtremeCloud IQ streamlines many of our network operations, making the job easier for everyone.

Luc Westerlinck, Chief Engineer & Safety Advisor, Crowne Plaza Antwerpen Hotel (Belgium)

The power to deliver guest experiences that wow

Additionally, ExtremeCloud IQ provides actionable insights at a metadata level, enabling hotels to optimize network performance based on how guests, applications, and devices are using it. Hospitality businesses can gain valuable data on guest preferences and foot traffic flow throughout their premises. Knowing how many customers use the guest network, how often they visit, how much time they spend on the network, what is their social networking behavior – all these metrics can be used to increase patronage and expand brand exposure.

ExtremeCloud IQ also supports location services that can help businesses personalize customer engagement and enhance operational efficiencies. For example, hotels can track new and repeat visitors, their engagement times, and associates or asset locations, to provide a contextual-based personalized experience to their guests.

(…) 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.

Marcus Thuresson, CEO, GRAM Group, owner of the Hotel Skansen in Båstad (Sweden)