Unsupported Nortel PBX Replaced with 3CX Phone System in Belgian Hotel
Centrally located in Ghent, Belgium, The Castelnou Aparthotel forms a perfect base in which to explore the historical city up close with all its cultural treasures, allowing visitors to discover what makes the city so special. Ghent is also the ideal starting point to explore other Flemish cities of art; Bruges, Antwerp and Brussels all can be reached in less than half an hour. Castelnou Aparthotel uniquely combines daily hotel services with the provision of the guest’s own stylish apartment.
When in Ghent for business for a longer period, their Gent-Zuid and Astrid Park Business Flats provide the solution. A fully furnished apartment with bedroom, bathroom, a comfortable living room with working space, and a fully fitted kitchenette await visitors.
The guests, whether on vacation, from the business sector or the academic world, appreciate the proximity and the easy accessibility of the harbour, the university, the historical city center and the motorways. Castelnou Aparthotel, Gent-Zuid and Astrid Park Business Flats are the ideal bases for anyone who is staying in Ghent.
End of the Line for Outdated and Unsupported Nortel PBX
Up until July 2011, Castelnou had been using a Matra Nortel PBX for their telephony requirements. It had outdated, limited features as well as an expensive maintenance contract. As Avaya announced that they would drop Nortel PBX support, they left Castelnou in a tricky situation as no support meant that it was difficult to expand or modify their set-up. With high communication costs as well as the expenses of leasing phone lines, Castelnou Aparthotel decided it was time for a change.
The new phone system would need to be almost the opposite of what they already had in place as it had to be cheaper to maintain and scale. It would also need to offer modern, rich features, such as routing calls via SIP trunks, therefore offering guests international calls at local costs, which would turn the hotel room phone service into a profit center again.
Having already been down the route of being tied in to a vendor with expensive maintenance, using a phone system that provided the same costly model was out of the question. Also, the new phone system would need to fully integrate with the Protel Property Management Software (PMS) that Castelnou were using.
Other requirements were that they needed flexibility – the planned set-up would be quite complicated and many traditional PBXs wouldn’t be able to handle it. In fact, Castelnou Aparthotel had been managing their PBX via Telix for DOS over a COM port!
Hotel rollouts are usually difficult to deploy as hotels operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Therefore, not wanting to negatively affect the guests, the new phone system needed to be installed and set-up extremely quickly. It also needed to be user friendly, to allow Castelnou employees to learn the new phone system efficiently.
3CX Phone System & 3CX Hotel Module Check In
3CX Phone System was the perfect choice as it was able to answer all of the hotels requirements. 3CX is competitively priced and supports the open SIP standard, meaning Castelnou would not be locked in with one vendor, as they were previously. 3CX Phone System is software based, therefore there’s no need for expensive maintenance contracts or to lease costly phone lines. It’s easy to scale and provides an unlimited number of extensions and lines without any extra proprietary modules.
The 3CX Hotel Module provides many features that are important to successfully run a hotel. Castelnou wanted to take advantage of hotel PBX features to further streamline their check-in and check-out process. For example, the 3CX Hotel Module automatically triggers certain events upon check-out, such as deleting remaining voicemails and blocking the extension to avoid unauthorized use.
Guests can set their own wake up calls via their room phones, without involving front desk. Front desk can overview all calls that have been made from any room and have them automatically billed to the guest as the 3CX Hotel Module easily integrates with almost any hotel or billing software. In Castelnou’s case, the 3CX Hotel Module was completely integrated with Protel Property Management System.
House-keeping features include being able to set the room status via the room phone itself, which avoids time consuming calls to front desk. The mini bar feature allows hotel staff to input mini bar inventory changes and restocking requests easily, also via the room phone.
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