Deliver a simple and secure VIP experience for every guest

After a transformative few years, which saw the entire industry adopt critical technology solutions in order to survive, hotels, venues and more are now offering seamless connected, digital-first services to their guests. But while this is an exciting time for innovation, this reliance on digital technology could also be a challenge to an industry that is largely built around in-person, human-to-human experiences.

“Hospitality companies must find a new recipe for success – one that perfectly strikes the balance between the digital and physical worlds, empowers employees to provide extra-human service in a high-tech environment, and delivers the total experience for guests,” says Warren Gordon, ARUBA/HPE Business Unit Manager at Duxbury Networking, local distributors of ARUBA/HPE technology.

Guest experience can and will make or break not just the stay but whether or not you get the business at all. It is has never been more critical to leverage technology to interact with guests. Driving consistent and personalised guest experience requires making sense of collected data quickly and responding accordingly. That’s why simply deploying Wi-Fi solutions for connectivity alone is no longer enough.

“Hoteliers need to evaluate Wi-Fi solutions that can enable proven technology innovations through ecosystems partnerships that help turn networking infrastructure into a powerful personalisation platform. To meet this demand, the hospitality industry needs to evolve constantly and be ready for coming innovations – such as facial recognition, service automation, robots and VR to name just a few. The Aruba Edge Services Platform can help hoteliers to get ahead of guest expectations and enable smart digital hotel initiatives,” says Gordon.

The first step to knowing your guest is ensuring they are on your network. Aruba’s Airpass enables your loyalty guests to transition automatically from their provider’s cellular network to your wireless network. Guests will appreciate the ease of connecting and you’ll gain immediate capabilities. With data gathered at the point of entry, rather than after a guest initiates a connection, new insights on traffic patterns and network usage can be delivered.

Additionally, network insights and usage can help IT understand where there might be connectivity issues so that alterations in the network can be deployed to deliver the best experiences.

Aruba’s Wi-Fi 6 infrastructure is designed to support hundreds of guests and associated devices simultaneously, without impacting Wi-Fi quality. Guests and staff can roam the hotel property or venue with consistently great performance. Aruba optimises the connection from the device to the best available access point regardless of where the device is carried. Critical applications can be prioritised so they can perform at their peak, not impacting the guest or staff experience.

“Hitless updates and hitless failover ensure that the wireless network can stay current with the latest security updates, tolerate faults, and be available whenever needed. No test interruptions, no lost experimental data, no dropped connections or transactions,” Gordon points out.

The infrastructure leverages industry-leading tools to auto-adapt to changing environments and applications:

Mobility in hospitality is a priority, but so too is the wired network. The Aruba AOS-CX operating system features a time-series data base that provides deep visibility into data traversing the switching fabric. Intuitive software-defined management tools, built-in analytics, and programmable scripting offer unparalleled insights into network and device activity, fault isolation, and system performance. Upgrades and updates can be easily enabled, reversed, and changed without

impacting the network or the people who rely on it.

The Network Analytics Engine (NAE), included with AOS-CX, provides a built-in framework for monitoring and troubleshooting networks.

IoT devices can have many standard OS platforms and it can be challenging to know what is on the hotel IT network especially with guests connecting. ClearPass Device Insight simplifies device onboarding using machine learning discovery methods to identify and profile a wider range of device types (guest devices, associate devices, security devices, etc.). Machine learning will also understand behaviour and other contextual factors over time to help profile new devices as they come on to the network.

Once devices are identified, ClearPass Policy Manager profiles, authenticates, authorises, and tightly manages network access using granular, policy-based access controls. Users and devices have restricted access to only those network, IT, and application resources for which they have been approved.

Aruba’s Dynamic Segmentation delivers the micro-segmentation needed for traffic on wired, wireless and the WAN using granular user/device/connectivity information. Policies are carried across the network end-to-end, ensuring that guest traffic is easily kept separate from associate or

corporate traffic, regardless of the location of the user or device or the switch port carrying the traffic.

Aruba’s edge platform includes assurance and orchestration features to maximise up-time, optimise user experiences, and reduce the time to troubleshoot issues to root cause. Automated network assurance delivers AIOps insights from a single pane of glass, while edge-to-cloud experience monitoring generates automated AI-based alerts that proactively pinpoint critical application and network issues.

The single pane of glass gives complete visibility of remote sites to those at corporate headquarters. IT can remotely monitor, manage, and troubleshoot the wired, wireless, and SD-WAN infrastructure from anywhere. Aruba’s SD-Branch solution offers integration capabilities across the WLAN and LAN optimised for SD-WAN, MPLS and cellular connectivity that is destined for the Internet or a data centre.

A mobile app allows employees to barcode scan Aruba infrastructure and plug them in with configuration happening automatically to get devices working.

Using the power of location, Aruba can improve the guest experience and help raise guest satisfaction scores. Aruba APs are location-ready and when supplemented with Aruba Beacons, can make an entire hospitality venue location smart. Aruba Meridian is an integral part of a holistic app

strategy by using location services to enable blue-dot wayfinding, push notifications, and implement specific campaigns. Utilising analytics from the network, facilities can ensure guests are helped the moment they enter a facility with automated check-in or enable them to use their smartphone to find a location (hotel room, conference centre, on-site restaurants, mobile concierge or workout room) without frustration or lost time.

Aruba’s asset tracking solution helps associates track assets by leveraging location-ready Aruba WLAN infrastructure and Bluetooth-based Aruba Tags. Hotel property, luggage, safety devices and other expensive assets can be monitored and found when needed, freeing up hotel staff to focus on

guest experience and not on finding a high-value item. This capability increases staff efficiency, reduces equipment costs, and improves guest experience.

“The most dynamic and transformative experiences happen at the edge. Aruba Edge Services Platform enables networks that use telemetry data, analyse that data and then execute actions that drive the desired business outcomes. Start the smart digital hotel journey by contacting us today,” says Gordon.