• Close
• |
• Email
• |
• Print

High-speed Internet connection is a must-have amenity for today’s hotel guests, but how do hotels maximize the infrastructure investment?

Done.

Unisys installed and secured the broadband infrastructure that has allowed Starwood Hotels to successfully compete for individual and group travelers in the hospitality market. The same broadband infrastructure is now the foundation for additional services like wireless access and state-of-the-art energy management, increasing the hotel’s return on investment.

In the competitive hospitality market, Starwood® Hotels turned to broadband network to enhance the guest experience and increase bottom line results. Unisys Zero-Gap Security Planning secures hotels’ broadband infrastructure closing the door on undesirable guests.
 

In the hotel industry where hospitality is the golden rule, the words “uninvited guest” would seem to be an oxymoron. Not so when that guest is an unprincipled hacker who penetrates and disrupts a hotel’s information system or creates spam that brings the hotel’s high-speed Internet service to its knees. With more and more hotels enhancing the guest experience through leading-edge technology amenities, Internet-based attacks are becoming more commonplace, creating problems that the highly competitive hotel marketplace can ill-afford.

To help prevent such security breaches from occurring at its properties, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. enlisted Unisys and its Zero-Gap Security Planning Services. Unisys provides Starwood with leading-edge consulting, managed security services, and infrastructure support. Introduced in 2002, Unisys Zero-Gap Security Planning Services is a holistic approach that not only helps companies like Starwood manage and minimize risk, but ensures that its guest-facing IT investments are continuously available and able to provide competitive advantage.

One of the world’s leading hotel and leisure companies, Starwood manages more than a quarter million guest rooms at 750-plus properties across 82 countries worldwide. Its 105,000 employees service millions of visitors annually at the hotels and resorts that comprise Starwood’s internationally recognized lodging brands: St. Regis®, The Luxury Collection®, Sheraton®,Westin®, Four Points® by Sheraton, and W®. In addition, the company’s award-winning guest loyalty program has more than 15 million members, an increasingly larger number of whom are tech-savvy, laptop-carrying, solo business travelers or groups.

Web-on-demand: Today’s expected guest amenity.

As hotel competition ratchets up, so does the variety of amenities hotels offer to differentiate their services: non-smoking rooms, exercise facilities, 24-hour cable and movie channels, and so on. But these once-premium services have become commodities. What’s in demand these days is unimpeded web availability, transparent access to guests’ corporate networks via secure virtual private networks (VPNs), and support for applications like videoconferencing and webcasting.

“Today’s business traveler is expected to stay connected when they’re out of the office,” says Allan Burstyn, product manager, Starwood Property Technology Business and Systems Strategy Division. Burstyn’s group has responsibility for delivering customer-facing services over the broadband network. “The emergence of VPNs has made it harder than ever for these travelers to cut the cord to their corporate networks and to e-mail. By providing broadband services for guests, Starwood becomes a preferred destination for these travelers.”

While installing high-speed Internet services for hotel guests may sound like a relatively straight-forward project, it has not been easy for some hotels to master. For one thing, the model that Internet service providers (ISPs) initially developed to supply Internet access to hotel guests involved trading off the cost of installing the broadband infrastructure for some of the collected guest revenue. Modeled after the way providers were delivering in-room movies, the idea sounded good in principal. In practice, however, the concept failed — along with the demise of the dotcoms — leaving many hotels with IT infrastructures they didn’t own and scrambling for service providers to run them.

Under the guidance of Carl Cohen, vice president, Property Technology Business and Systems Strategy Division, Starwood passed on the dotcom model, opting for a long-range strategy based on a hotel-owned broadband infrastructure that could expand beyond just high-speed Internet to offer guest amenities like entertainment, energy management, wireless and a more personalized online user experience. In Starwood’s vision, broadband became a platform for multiple revenue streams as well as a means for lowering the hotel’s return on its infrastructure investment.

Helped along by full-service provider Unisys — rather than by a pure-play ISP — this strategy allowed Starwood to build and maintain a broadband infrastructure that addressed a second problem hotels faced but didn’t always recognize. Very simply, providing secure high-speed Internet access to hotel guests is vastly different than offering it to employees on a corporate local area network (LAN).

Says Burstyn: “In an enterprise environment you control the software and hardware of every computer that connects to the network; you manage how, where, when, and under what circumstances users connect. In a hotel environment you don’t have any control over what guests are going to do or how their computers are configured. A guest can do something — passively or actively — that causes problems for other users or Web sites on the Internet. This makes security particularly challenging, because while you need a very open network, at the same time, you want to guard against hackers and misuse.”

Results Delivered

“Security benefits guests in another way — by guaranteeing the network’s reliability,” continues Burstyn. “If someone is interfering with the router or the bandwidth is getting clogged up as a result of a hacker attack, it slows everything down and other users suffer. So, security to us is really about the stability of the network; without security that’s all at risk.”

With the help of Unisys who provides complete end-to-end services management to the hotel, Starwood has been able to offer its guests a secure high-speed, full bandwidth Internet experience. This is a critical advantage, since the group which Cohen runs operates as a stand-alone business unit chartered with selling broadband technologies not only to guests at Starwood-owned properties, but also to franchisees at managed properties. If the broadband business group is unable to offer a quality “product,” customers will refuse to pay for it and hotel operators will experience revenue loss.

“Guest service at Starwood is first and foremost. If a guest can’t access the Internet, the property won’t charge them. If a group holding meetings at the hotel was counting on using the Internet and can’t, this can cut into the hotel’s bottom line because typically a hotel will discount its room rate to make up for a disappointing guest experience and to help shore up its reputation. Consequently, it’s extremely important for us to have reliable partners who can help us deliver a quality Internet experience to our customers and a consistent level of service to our hotel operators,” explains Cohen.

Managing and securing Starwood Turbo Net®

In mid 2001, Unisys began installing the Cisco-based equipment that forms the underpinnings for Turbo Net®, Starwood’s branded high-speed Internet service. Within 18 months, Unisys deployed the Turbo Net solution in guest and meeting rooms at 80 separate properties across the US, the Caribbean Islands, and the UK. New properties are added to the installation schedule continuously.

The Starwood Turbo Net allows guests to securely connect to their corporate data networks and the Internet over secure VPN. Because of the way it’s configured, hotel and meeting room guests are able to access Turbo Net without having to reconfigure their laptops — making it intuitively accessible, as well as safe. Since each property is different, Unisys conducts an initial site survey to assess internal cabling requirements at a hotel, delivering a formal design proposal before installation proceeds. Upon acceptance, Unisys project manages all the details from ordering the T-1 links and the Cisco servers, switches, routers and desktop devices to configuring and staging the equipment before it arrives at its final destination. Unisys even provides printed collateral and marketing materials to help the property publicize its new service.

Once the equipment is installed and tested, Unisys trains the onsite personnel — generally the front desk staff — who are typically the first contacts for calls from guests with questions about the service.

Should a guest have a problem or a question that the front desk can’t answer, they are automatically routed to a trouble-shooting call center that Unisys maintains 24/7 for the Starwood properties. Here experienced help desk technicians help the caller achieve problem resolution. If for some reason, the problem can’t be solved, it’s escalated to the specialists in the Unisys Customer Service Center who, if necessary, can be dispatched to do an onsite repair to equipment installed at a Starwood property. It is this kind of thorough support that has consistently proven the Unisys team’s value to Starwood.

A case in point is how Unisys helped Starwood secure the broadband networks at its properties. At the time of the equipment’s initial deployment, Unisys Managed Services Center (MSC) technicians, who routinely monitor systems at the hotels, noticed an unusual traffic spike at several locations. Suspecting a potential hacker was afoot, the NOC staff took immediate action to prevent damage to hotel data as well as to any other users on the system. The effort was “above and beyond” since at the time Unisys was not yet contracted to manage security at the hotels’ properties. It didn’t take long, however, before Starwood and Unisys put in place a security program to guarantee any future hacker attempts would be efficiently addressed.

Today, Unisys protects Starwood’s Turbo Net enabled properties with a multi-level security program designed to prevent attacks coming into the network from the Internet, going out to the Internet from the hotel, or crossing the network from guest to guest. The Unisys approach covers a broad variety of protection that includes: enabling port-to-port security on the Cisco BBSM (Building Broadband Services Manager) switches, implementation of strict account and password policies, comprehensive management of access lists, patch evaluation and application, and anti-viral and firewall procedures. Additionally, the MSC at Unisys remotely monitors the Starwood properties around-the-clock.

“Unisys helped us understand and address the unique security vulnerabilities posed in delivering broadband amenities to hotel guests,” says Burstyn. “One thing that’s very clear, however, is that you’re never fully finished. A security program is not something you put in place and leave. It needs to be actively managed. That’s really a challenge because there’s always a new threat or a new vulnerability. With the help of Unisys, we’ve had a good track record in solving security issues.”

Unisys: A facilitator of solutions

“One of the advantages of working with Unisys,” says Tara Dunning of Unisys Hospitality Broadband Services, “is that we offer a more comprehensive approach to solving customer problems than a pure-play provider. Because of our in-depth understanding of the issues surrounding vertical marketplaces, like hospitality, and our broad experience in delivering technology and security solutions, Unisys is able to envision — and develop solutions for — the types of problems that narrowly-focused service providers don’t even have the expertise to comprehend. This means that Unisys can help Starwood expand the value of its broadband infrastructure in ways that other vendors can’t.”

“Because Starwood is relieved of the burden of administering, managing, and securing the Turbo Net infrastructure network, they can concentrate on doing what they do best: marketing the Starwood brand, providing amenities to their guests, and coming up with new forms of revenue or services from the broadband network,” says Dunning.

And in fact, that is exactly what Starwood is doing with recent initiatives that utilize the broadband network to implement wireless communications for guests as well as energy management controls for hotel rooms.

Building on the in-place broadband infrastructure, Unisys has begun a major initiative to install wireless capabilities for hotel guests at an initial 150 Starwood properties. A preliminary rollout to 50 hotels was accomplished in just three weeks. An important new amenity, the new wireless services will have a credit card interface and be available from meeting and guest rooms as well as from hotel restaurant and similar public spaces. The service also will allow wait staff at the properties to record and immediately communicate table orders back to the restaurant kitchen or bar, resulting in faster service.

The hotel group is maximizing its return on investment on the Unisys-built and managed broadband infrastructure in another way, making it a platform for state-of-the-art energy management capabilities. By utilizing the existing broadband infrastructure, Starwood realizes a double win. Not only will it recognize savings from more efficient heat and air conditioning controls in guest rooms, it will also dramatically reduce the installation costs for adding this capability. And with the help of Unisys end-to-end services management, Starwood can continue to safely add new and better amenities to its guest broadband network.

“Unisys has been a true partner to Starwood,” says Carl Cohen. “They have been responsive to our needs, implementing proactive technology and support initiatives that help us compete in the hospitality marketplace and meet our strategic business goals. Unisys has helped us build a secure broadband infrastructure that will be a platform for guest amenities and hotel services long into the future. Unisys allows Starwood to go to sleep at night knowing we have a secure revenue stream and that our brand is protected.”

Key Industry Issues Statement

IT infrastructure protection

For Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc., staying competitive means providing high-speed Internet access for hotel guests. Security plays an important role in delivering this amenity. Not only does a secure environment protect the users of Starwood’s branded high-speed Internet service, Turbo Net, but it also helps ensure that network attacks don’t impede speed and bandwidth availability.

Through the help of full-service provider Unisys, Starwood has a secure broadband infrastructure that serves as a platform for a wide scope of services that go beyond just high-speed Internet for guests to include: wireless services for employees and guests, energy management for guest rooms, entertainment and a more personalized online user experience.

Privacy

Assuring users’ privacy is an important part of the Starwood Turbo Net service. Privacy initiatives are designed to guarantee that guest information is protected and unreachable from the public portion of the broadband network. Additionally by utilizing virtual private network technology, Turbo Net allows customers to access their corporate network applications and systems through the use of a secure tunneling protocol guaranteeing that transmission of data is safe from prying eyes.

Client at a glance

• Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc.
• St. Regis
• The Luxury Collection
• Sheraton
• Westin
• Four Points by Sheraton

Industry

Hospitality

Size

750+ properties, 250,000+ guest rooms

Countries of operation

82 worldwide

Employees

105,000

Critical Solution Components

• Managed Security Services
• Broadband Infrastructure Design and Installation
• Wireless LAN Design and Installation
• Remote Network Management and Help Desk Services
• Centralized Project Management

Back to Top