Royal Garden is a luxury hotel located in London in the iconic Kensington High Street. The hotel has 400 bedrooms with unparalleled views of the London skyline. The Royal Garden is proud of its awesome location in a borough with an array of shops and restaurants to suit every need and walking distance to three world class museums, Kensington Palace and adjoining Gardens. But hotel fame and success are not just about location, it is about being internationally recognised as London’s most flexible 5 Star Hotel offering excellent value where distinction in service comes naturally. The hotel staff of 300 employees works hard every day to make them feel at home taking care of each detail. Its green policy is constantly exploring new sustainable opportunities to reduce carbon print. All of this makes The Royal Garden Hotel the perfect choice for enjoying your business or pleasure stay.

Requirements

• To improve operational efficiency.
• To provide guests with the same technology experience they have at home.
• Stable and future ready wireless network
• Network performance control & management to gain visibility.

Solution

• 400 RUCKUS Indoor and Outdoor Wi-Fi 6 APs
• Virtual SmartZone Controller 3.0
• 30 RUCKUS ICX ICX7150-48PF Switches
• RUCKUS Analytics

Key Outcomes

• Elevated guest experience.
• Improved operational efficiency.
• Optimised property performance.
• Flexible future-proof Wi-Fi network.

Challenges

An optimal connectivity is crucial for supporting hospitality operations, new applications and international pleasure and business guests needs with multiple devices per person. The original Wi-Fi and switching hotel equipment was reaching end of life. Unfortunately, the previous equipment started being unable to support the increasing number of concurrent sessions and devices causing blackspots, lack of resilience, and lack of monitoring and reporting tools. To avoid the blackspots the hotel had to free up IP addresses, usually the staff had to stop connecting to cover guests Wi-Fi access.

Engineers were struggling with the network signal in a large building like this with an extensive use of concrete and steel causing lack of signal.

The old network equipment was not able to provide Chromecast support to the TV guestrooms and this feature is a gold asset for travelers who want to feel like at home streaming their content and enjoy their services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, etc., so it was time for a big change.

Solution

The new 10GB wireless technology is based on RUCKUS solutions that provide everything needed to modernise the hotel network: performance, scalability, reliability, security, management and control giving support to back of house operational services like staff phone system, the PDQ’s and point of sale terminals at reception, restaurants and bars as well as the front of house and guest areas needed to provide fast internet coverage for events and guest rooms.

The new network is based on indoor and outdoor APs that ensure the most reliable connectivity covering the 10 floors up, 3 floors down (mainly back of house services), 6 event rooms, 2 restaurants, 1 bar, reception area and ball rooms being able to support up to 1400 guests in total.

All RUCKUS APs are based on patented RF technologies. These antenna and channel optimization technologies address Wi-Fi signals by choosing the best performing paths and channels what it is quite important specially in historic and large buildings like the Royal Garden hotel.

Monitoring the APs is the virtual RUCKUS SmartZone™ a scalable and versatile WLAN controller designed to run in a private cloud deployment. The combination of RUCKUS ICX switches and Wi-Fi APs deliver a powerful and stable network connection. The ICX new edge switches provide flexible scalability and make easier the network set up and management. Equipped with PoE, which made it easier to locate RUCKUS APs anywhere without the added expense and disruption of running additional cabling. ICX switches work seamlessly with SmartZone™ network controller to deliver the most performance and cost effective unified wired and wireless Royal Garden network.

Hotel’s focus on providing its guests with a best-in-class experience required the RUCKUS Analytics service, a powerful detailed client troubleshooting tool that:

• Reduce IT operations OPEX
• Helps IT teams improve the user experience
• Provides comprehensive visibility into network operations.
• With Analytics the IT team now has a proactive position to any problems that may arise.

Elevated guest experience

RUCKUS Analytics was added to the project because it now gives Royal Garden Hotel full network visibility into network operations. As a result, Fairland Consulting and the hotel IT team are now able to act proactively to prevent network incidents and service disruptions. This allows hotel staff to concentrate on what they do best, delivering a superior guest experience.

RUCKUS Analytics not only helps us to increase operation efficiency but also help measure the guest user experience. We host a lot of bespoke events and functions at the hotel, with very specific connectivity requirements. RUCKUS Analytics provides the hotel with reports after where we can review any issues that may have arisen. This is invaluable when you operate a busy hotel like Royal Garden Hotel.

With RUCKUS, guests of Royal Garden Hotel now enjoy fast speeds, comprehensive coverage, and a personalised experience. The Wi-Fi network now supports a secure and easy in-room entertainment solution with Chromecast support, which allows guests to stream preferred media content easily and securely from their mobile devices onto the in-room TVs just like at home. Guests choose what they want to watch on popular apps such as Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube and many more.

Improved operational efficiency

Strong, reliable connectivity ensures uninterrupted network availability at the Royal Garden Hotel to optimise the performance of hotel systems and improve operational efficiency.

Food and Beverage orders can now be done with tablets, out of traditional pen and paper, saving lot of time to the events team. The conference and events door locking system has been migrated to NFC technology providing a secure, fast and high-quality connectivity to host top events organized by big companies or sports clubs among others that demand private networks.

Safety and security in the building have also been improved. A new fire alarm, replacing the old one with pagers, has been implemented running on the new Wi-Fi.

Optimised property performance

The network coverage and the large concurrent number of accesses are no longer a challenge for the engineers and thanks to the full visibility of the entire network provided by RUCKUS Analytics -they act proactively to avoid network incidents and service disruption while focusing on their core tasks.

Since the new RUCKUS solutions deployment, there have been zero customer complaints and unsatisfaction comments about Wi-Fi access or navigation quality in the booking portals, reaching an excellent overall customer satisfaction scoring in all of them which results in increasing the booking and occupancy rates.

Flexible future-proof Wi-Fi network

The RUCKUS solution makes it easy for the Royal Garden Hotel to add new services and applications in the future, and is designed to support current and future standards, protocols and technology.

Looking ahead, the Royal Garden plans to implement new services like mobile check in and mobile room keys to eliminate plastic cards according to its sustainable policy.