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Hospitality Via Wired PhonesHospitality Via Wired Phones

One area where IP telephony has the potential to make a clear impact is in the hospitality industry; most vendors have a solution or set of solutions for this market. One example is Avaya's new SIP iPhones from Teledex, which let hotel guests experience visuals, which hoteliers should appreciate. Adding the visual to the phone isn't just cool, but it provides interlinks to the hotel's services, moving hotels beyond selling rooms at rack rates, beyond just staying competitive, and to potentially greater profitability by adding all the trimmings offered by the hotel and surrounding area of interest to their guests.

Matt Brunk

June 26, 2008

2 Min Read
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One area where IP telephony has the potential to make a clear impact is in the hospitality industry; most vendors have a solution or set of solutions for this market. One example is Avaya's new SIP iPhones from Teledex, which let hotel guests experience visuals, which hoteliers should appreciate. Adding the visual to the phone isn't just cool, but it provides interlinks to the hotel's services, moving hotels beyond selling rooms at rack rates, beyond just staying competitive, and to potentially greater profitability by adding all the trimmings offered by the hotel and surrounding area of interest to their guests.

One area where IP telephony has the potential to make a clear impact is in the hospitality industry; most vendors have a solution or set of solutions for this market. One example is Avaya's new SIP iPhones from Teledex, which let hotel guests experience visuals, which hoteliers should appreciate. Adding the visual to the phone isn't just cool, but it provides interlinks to the hotel's services, moving hotels beyond selling rooms at rack rates, beyond just staying competitive, and to potentially greater profitability by adding all the trimmings offered by the hotel and surrounding area of interest to their guests.The wired telephone isn't just used to call room service, but guests can visualize what they are ordering and place the order using the phone without talking to anyone. Guest services aren't restricted to the confines of the hotel either. The constraints will be the imaginations of the guy writing the software. Content can include hotel information and services, news, weather, sports, local attractions and why not local advertisements (revenue to hotel) of interests to the guests?

Teledex display phones can be configured either as SIP devices or hybrid phones that can be converted from analog to SIP phones with a firmware upgrade. This benefits hotels that want to deploy interactive touch-screen devices in an analog environment, with an option to convert to an IP environment at a later time. So the added value is a migration path that many, according to the data from Dell'Oro Group, are choosing--and that is the path of a Hybrid IP solution.

Once these phones begin to find their way to the hotels, it will become what I think as the "norm" for guests to expect them. My gut told me when I had one of those five minute conversations that you don't forget--one of which was with Bill Rich of Pingtel during a long ago VoiceCon meeting, that the hotel industry was to benefit greatly with SIP interactive phones because of the great level of customization. Teledex is no stranger to the hotel industry, and their phones sit comfortably on both Avaya and Nortel boxes.

About the Author

Matt Brunk

Matt Brunk has worked in past roles as director of IT for a multisite health care firm; president of Telecomworx, an interconnect company serving small- and medium-sized enterprises; telecommunications consultant; chief network engineer for a railroad; and as an analyst for an insurance company after having served in the U.S. Navy as a radioman. He holds a copyright on a traffic engineering theory and formula, has a current trademark in a consumer product, writes for NoJitter.com, has presented at VoiceCon (now Enterprise Connect) and has written for McGraw-Hill/DataPro. He also holds numerous industry certifications. Matt has manufactured and marketed custom products for telephony products. He also founded the NBX Group, an online community for 3Com NBX products. Matt continues to test and evaluate products and services in our industry from his home base in south Florida.

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