17th Century Italian Hotel Modernizes WiFi to Improve Customer Satisfaction

The Grand Hotel La Chiusa Di Chietri is located in a 25-acre Mediterranean Park with 150 rooms, plus twelve 17^th century stone Trulli cottages. Most of the hotel's guests are business travelers who need to connect work laptops to the WiFi network, particularly in its conference area. However, it began to realize that its connectivity needs outpaced the property’s existing WiFi network.

To remedy this, Chiusa di Chietri turned to system integrator Openapkin of Locorotondo to undertake the necessary upgrade. It performed an analysis of the property to determine what was causing the WiFi issue.

The hotel found that there was:

• Insufficient wireless coverage, due to incorrect placement and number of access points,
• Network management problems, since the previous devices were of a stand-alone type and of different brands, a situation that made it impossible to have a clear and precise idea of ​​the equipment load, to control radio channels and to use diagnostic tools capable of support the guest who fails to use the service.
• Insufficient wireless coverage, due to incorrect placement and number of access points.
• Reduced flexibility of the network given the lack of centralized control and centralized configuration.

"Based on the analysis, the hotel management decided to standardize and optimize the WiFi connectivity service," said Domenico Pugliese, Event Manager, Hotel La Chiusa di Chietri. "In addition to this, the specific commitment of the hotel in the conference sector highlighted its need to be able to rely on equipment capable of ensuring good performance in high-density environments, with the ability to quickly create Wireless LAN dedicated to the specific congress, which then reserve guaranteed band. The hotel also needed to partially exploit the existing wireless infrastructure, to try to reduce the invasive interventions, as well as [speed along the process so it could be] operational within a few days, due to an important congress event."

Chiusa chose Cambium Networks because the cnPilot platform offers high-performance Wi-Fi that deploys rapidly and delivers reliable, flexible coverage. Cambium solutions offer central control with cnMaestro end-to-end networks manager, for user-friendly, low-maintenance network operation.

Openapkin removed the existing router (Mikrotik) and access points and installed 19 access points Cambium Networks cnPilot e410 for the coverage of the main building and the meeting areas, and 12 cnPilot e410 for the complete coverage of the main building, as well as an access point e501 for the coverage of the pool area. In this way, an almost uniform coverage was obtained in the areas of interest, particularly in the areas dedicated to the congress activities, events and the restaurant open to the public.

The installation activities were carried out in three distinct phases: a first phase of pre-configuration in the laboratory, a second phase of physical installation (performed by internal staff) and a third consisting of tuning activities on channels and powers, in order to optimize the stability and performance of the network.

"Our main objective was to improve the quality of service and customer satisfaction, particularly in the conference area, where attendees often have greater needs than your regular hotel guests," Pugliese said. "Since the upgrade installation has been performed, the guests, whoever they are and wherever they stay on the premises, can now connect seamlessly to WiFi without any lack of coverage nor disconnection issue. It has become much more comfortable than before and is considered as one of the amenities of the property."

With Cambium, Chiusa was able to connect the main building, meeting areas, all of the Trulli and pool area to significantly improve the uniformity of coverage of the property’s public areas.

"Guests are enjoying their stay even more," Pugliese added. "Nothing stops then anymore from working, networking or relaxing on our property, and staff members benefit from the right connection for their mobile devices. You could say that we have become a stress-free hotel."