Hotels Add Infrastructure
As wireless devices become ubiquitous, hotels are facing more demands on their Wi-Fi infrastructure during meetings.
“It’s a matter of allowing the planner and the attendees to use their technology the same way they would be able to at work or home,” says Jim Spellos, a meetings technology educator and conference speaker who runs the Meetings U. website. “A huge, hot-button right now is the connectivity issue within hotels, and not only the cost of it, but the actual speed that a planner is getting and what they’re able to provide for their attendees. That’s a hot-button issue these days because it is so inconsistent from property to property.”
The hotel companies know that. “From a global brand standpoint, technology is one of the four pillars that we are focusing on,” says Rodahl Leong-Lyons, vice president of sales, the Americas, at Hyatt Hotels Corporation. “The challenge that we run up against is the different vendors that we have in our different hotels. We have consolidated many of our vendors so it’s not as many as we’ve had in the past, and when we consider our portfolio worldwide and the different nuances of how technology generally, and Wi-Fi and Internet access specifically, works in each of our hotels in each country, in each city, getting that all under one system or a handful of systems is a big challenge that we need to address from an infrastructure standpoint.”
Hyatt is not alone in this. Marriott Hotels & Resorts is also working closely with the owners of its hotels, says Page Petry, chief information resources officer for Marriott International. “We all recognize that you have to have great bandwidth in your hotels, and you can’t look back,” she says. “We can never take our eye off the bandwidth demands of our hotels. I don’t see that going away.”
Dolce Hotels and Resorts has made “significant upgrades to increase our server capacity,” says Barry Goldstein, chief revenue officer for Dolce Hotels & Resorts. That includes both the bandwidth and the number of devices that its facilities can handle. “Secure wireless also needs to be available,” he says. “A lot of hotels today have a very open [Wi-Fi system] where anybody can get on. What we have started to do is, if you have a meeting in a particular meeting room which may sit next to three other meeting rooms, we need to be able to make that wireless secure. Even though it may be free (or not free), we need to be able to lock it down.”
In Las Vegas, MGM Resorts International has made a $14-million investment in a custom Cisco Wi-Fi network for all of its properties, starting with the Bellagio Las Vegas, MGM Grand Hotel & Casino, and Mandalay Bay Las Vegas, says Michael Dominguez, the company’s senior vice president of corporate hotel sales. The system, which is two to four times as fast as the standard hotel Wi-Fi, should be in place in all of the company’s hotels on The Strip by the end of next year. The new Wi-Fi system gives MGM Resorts the ability to support 120,000 concurrent users in Las Vegas.
The volunteer organizers of this year’s Miami Social Media Day got a jolt at their event, on June 30, when attendees quickly overwhelmed the public Wi-Fi in their venue. Karl Nybergh, a meeting consultant at Miami-based Conference Resources and Solutions, had volunteered to run the registration desk. “An hour into registration, a few attendees had already told me they were having trouble with the Wi-Fi,” he says. “I grabbed one of the facility’s technical staff and said to him, ‘we’re having some problems with the Wi-Fi, [attendees] are saying it’s very slow. Is there a possibility of pushing up the bandwidth?’” After looking into it, Nybergh says, the staffer at the facility said their public Wi-Fi was using all the bandwidth available.
The event, with 36 sessions focused on the topic of social media, was chock full of people who were constantly posting text and images on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr, and streaming video to and from YouTube and many other social media sites. This sucked up bandwidth at a rate far greater than a different crowd might have. The resulting hassles proved inconvenient — and especially embarrassing considering the theme of the day.
Welcome to what most meetings will look like in the not-so-distant future, according to Mary Ann Pierce, president of MAP Digital, a New York City-based digital events agency. “Attendees want to be able to shape their experience, and that requires cloud technology,” she says. “Without the cloud, attendees don’t have access to communicate with each other, to communicate with the speaker, to ask questions, download white papers, take surveys, and create one-on-one appointments. If they can’t constantly connect, especially if they are younger, they’re not going to come to your conference.”
Pierce sums this up with the idea that we are now a “digital society.”
“That means as far as communication is concerned, we are a hybrid society, and that is not going away,” she says. “There’s beginning to be no demarcation between digital and face-to-face experiences.”
Of course, the lifeblood of our digital society is the Internet, particularly Wi-Fi wireless connectivity. We are quickly reaching the point where that connectivity is going to be as necessary to a meeting as the meeting room itself.
It’s not just social media that uses up bandwidth these days. Events are incorporating streaming video into everything from presentations to training sessions, and using instant polling apps to involve audiences in presentations as they are happening. All of that social media is not just extraneous chatter, but part of a content delivery strategy to get participants involved in and excited about events. And that is putting a lot more pressure on hotels and other venues that want to host those meetings.
“One of the challenges we have had with the development of cloud technology in our industry is planners usually are more interested in whether or not the bandwidth is free than if a property has the bandwidth to meet the meeting’s goals,’” says Michael Dominguez, senior vice president of corporate hotel sales for MGM Resorts International.
That attitude reflects an old-fashioned mindset, says Jim Spellos, a meetings technology educator and conference speaker who runs the Meetings U. website. “Host organizations can’t make an assumption with technology the same way they can’t make assumptions about food and beverage and room setup, and all the other components of a meeting,” he adds. “The requirements have to be quantified and the setups need to be tested before a decision is made.”
Here are seven issues to consider that will help shift your bandwidth mindset from “is it free?” to “will it meet my meeting’s needs?”
1. Consider the hotelier’s perspective on bandwidth
“When it comes to bandwidth issues in general, many times the hotels feel they’re going to be left holding the bag at the last minute,” says Pierce. “A lot of times hotels end up charging groups extra money to go into overtime and bring in extra IT staff because the scope of how much bandwidth was needed was not detailed beforehand and expectations weren’t managed. And whose fault is that, ultimately? It’s the planner’s.”
At Associated Luxury Hotels International (ALHI), “we recommend that planners not count on, or expect, the hotel to know what the group’s technological needs will be,” says Chris Riccardi, the company’s vice president of global sales. “Planners should know this information about their meeting and bring it to the table when negotiating with a hotel or resort.”
One key step to getting a handle on this new information is not to be afraid of it, says Scott Steinberg, a speaker, author, and consultant on strategic innovation who runs akeynotespeaker.com. “Everybody gets caught up in the technology, and most feel that it’s so overwhelming they can’t possibly master it.”
The reality, according to Steinberg, is that a great deal of it can be understood with just a little effort. “You don’t have to be a tech expert to successfully leverage technology,” he says. “You simply have to have an idea of how you want to utilize it. Ask yourself two questions: What are your attendees most likely to use? And what will best benefit the format of your conference? Start from there.”
2. Seek Professional Advice
Before the site selection process begins, planners should consult with their company’s IT department, or hire a consultant or contractor to handle the technology. “There are times you need to bring an expert in,” Meetings U.’s Spellos says. “You just want to make sure that [you aren’t] lost in the weeds trying to understand what the IT folks in the hotel are talking about. You don’t need to know every single piece of information, but you need to know how to approach it and how to at least start a conversation.”
Once you are ready to begin approaching properties, MGM’s Dominguez adds that it’s always a good idea to get the hotel’s and the host organization’s IT professionals together at the outset. That way, he says, “we have a much better success rate of not missing critical questions or critical needs.”
Another good idea is to offer that expertise to the attendees onsite when the event is happening, says Riccardi. “Consider having a ‘tech desk’ at their meeting,” he says. “It can help attendees use bandwidth more efficiently.”
3. Conduct an audit of your attendees’ Internet-access needs
First and foremost, plan on attendees — particularly younger and more tech-savvy ones — having a laptop, tablet computer, and a smartphone or possibly two, and using them all. “You have to assume that you will need the infrastructure for three devices,” says Barry Goldstein, chief revenue officer for Dolce Hotels & Resorts.
“Our attendees have voracious appetites for connectivity,” says Pierce. “We provide the connectivity, so we know how many IP addresses are going out. If there are 2,000 people at a conference and I’m getting 8,000 IP addresses, I know people are playing on multiple devices.”
One result of attendees using multiple devices, says Bruce Miller, vice president of product marketing for Xirrus, a wireless networking firm, is that “networks that used to work fine just a few years ago are slowing way down and having problems. You start with how many users there are and then what they are going to be running, and what applications. If you are allowing video, that’s a huge difference from just saying, ‘give me general Internet access where I’m browsing the Web or just posting to Facebook.’”
More and more, hotels are offering tiered Internet service in their meeting facilities, public spaces, and guest rooms. The bottom level is usually designed to be acceptable for light Web browsing and email, while those whose Internet needs are more bandwidth-intensive pay more for better service. Hotels are not alone in this. More and more Internet service providers (ISPs) are offering consumers a similar deal, with tiered service plans.
At Marriott, the select-service and extended-stay brands offer free basic Wi-Fi for up to three devices, and the full-service properties offer two pricing levels for up to six devices (free for top-tier loyalty program members), says Page Petry, chief information resources officer for Marriott International. “Bandwidth is expensive,” she adds. “It’s the intensity of the use that makes it expensive in today’s environment, and we have to balance that growing demand.”
So do organizations that host events, Pierce says. “One of our conferences, in healthcare, has 10,000 attendees,” she notes. They’re not all there at the same time, but even so there’s a point at which the client says ‘I’m hitting that $10,000 mark for connectivity service and that’s all I want to spend.”
4. Conduct an audit of the event’s Internet access needs
From a meetings and events standpoint, customers are “responding fine” to tiered pricing, says Rodahl Leong-Lyons, vice president of sales, the Americas, for Hyatt Hotels Corporation, particularly when their attendees have a free option in which planners don’t have to get involved. “They are hyper-focused on the Internet connectivity they need for the objectives of the meeting.”
So start with all the Tweeting, Facebooking, and YouTubeing attendees and then add streaming video of the event’s content to the equation. This social media is by far the most bandwidth-intensive activity in any meeting. How much of it there is can depend on the client, or the industry. High-tech firms tend to use a lot of bandwidth, but they aren’t the only companies. MAP Digital’s Pierce notes that many of her financial services clients tend to do a tremendous amount of webcasting, because federal regulation mandate that certain types of information be shared publically rather than passed on exclusively to favored investors.
And Goldstein says a lot of pharmaceutical clients who meet in Dolce’s hotels use streaming video extensively in training sessions, often sending it to every participant rather than using a big screen. “You absolutely need to be able to increase your bandwidth for that,” he adds.
“For webcasting we need our own ‘dedicated pipe’ as we call it,” says Pierce. “It has to be free of routers and firewalls — a ‘clean pipe.’ If a hotel has a dedicated Cisco TelePresence suite, it’s a dedicated area and we’ve been successfully webcasting over that.”
Of course it’s important to remember that all that bandwidth costs money. “There’s a hundred ways to webcast,” Pierce says. “Is live absolutely necessary? If someone’s not at your conference, are they changing up their schedule to be there? Is there a Q&A or a chance for the remote attendee to participate? All of these factors affect how much bandwidth an event will require.”
5. Include a bandwidth assessment during site inspections
It is important to remember that “wireless is not wireless, it is coming in from somewhere,” says MGM’s Dominguez.
For technology-intensive groups, planners should look for facilities with “multiple sources of high-speed Internet access,” Pierce says. “One pipe coming in is not enough, it’s not a best practice. It’s not just the Internet coming in. The hotel has to be wired internally, so it can be distributed, whether on a local area network or a wired connection to the meeting room. I wouldn’t want my speakers uploading and pushing slides to session rooms on wireless — some of these files are huge, especially at pharmaceutical meetings.”
That means looking for a fiber optic Internet connection that goes all the way to the meeting room. “Fiber is so wonderful because you can ramp it up or close it down,” she adds. “You can go up to 100 MB or just have 10 MB, whereas [a standard copper cable connection] just won’t let you do that — it just won’t accept that much bandwidth.”
Sometimes firms just install the Internet access they need. Pierce has been taking a major international financial firm to the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco for 15 years, and in that time the property has gone from standard copper cable to two separate fiber lines and a microwave connection. The fiber lines were installed for a CNET event and then turned off after it was over. “It was just sitting there, no one had used it for a year,” Pierce says. “And then somebody remembered it and we turned it on and it was golden.”
Another best practice is “never, ever share connectivity,” Pierce adds. “It should be dedicated connectivity, not connectivity that is shared with administration or with the sleeping rooms. I’m telling you, people download videos like crazy in sleeping rooms. You don’t want to have some kid downloading all the Star Wars films during your conference.”
6. How many connections are available?
Another thing to remember is that bandwidth is only one of two key chokepoints when it comes to connectivity. The other is the availability of access points.
“One of the issues that some facilities are dealing with isn’t that they can’t provide bandwidth, it is that they can’t accommodate the number of devices that are coming into the room, especially if people come in with one, two, maybe even three or four Internet-connected devices that go after that Web as soon as they walk into that space,” says Spellos of Meetings U.
The routers that Wi-Fi devices connect to in order to get on the Internet can handle a specific number of devices, and once they are maxed out, a new device can only get on when another one goes offline — say if someone leaves the room and goes beyond that router’s reach.
“Oftentimes the hotel might be able to put in another access point,” Spellos adds. “If that’s not going to work, there are organizations out there that can literally bring in bandwidth for you and bring in more access points. I know a lot of financial conferences that don’t rely on the Internet capabilities of the hotel, but essentially bring their own cloud and access points to ensure they have what they require for their event.”
Dealing with this issue is a specialty of Xirrus, which makes Xirrus Arrays that offer as many Wi-Fi decive connection points as 20 or 30 standard Wi-Fi controllers.
“For temporary events, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, and RIM all use our products in their events groups,” says Bruce Miller, vice president of product marketing for Thousand Oaks, CA-based Xirrus. “They will come into a location — it could be indoor or outdoor, we have a lot of customers who do a lot of outdoor events, concerts or festivals for example — and instead of a building a [hard-wired, permanent] network [our Xirrus Arrays] run for seven to 10 days and then they tear down and move on to the next gig. Some of these companies have events all over the world, one or more every week.”
7. Make connectivity part of the contract negotiations
There are several reasons to make your connectivity needs part of the contract negotiations with a venue rather than leaving it for later, beginning with making sure the venue has the access you need.
“We recommend that planners package all of their technological needs together at the beginning, when they send out their RFP, so that there are no hidden surprises,” says ALHI’s Riccardi.
Even for properties where the technical requirements will not be a problem, Dominguez recommends having “at least a general discussion at the time of contracting so there are no surprises about cost. But as you move forward, I would never be inside of 90 days to have that discussion.” Last-minute changes are not only more difficult, they are more expensive, he adds.
Riccardi agrees, noting that pricing for technology varies widely from hotel to hotel.
“The best strategy is to start talking about Wi-Fi and technology needs before the contract is signed,” says Pierce. “The hotel is really interested in the food and beverage and the sleeping rooms — connectivity is not a high margin item for them — so bring it up when they are still trying to make the deal. After the contract is signed it’s like the horse is out of the barn. You still can get Wi-Fi service but you won’t get the level of attention necessary to meet the needs of your event.”