Johannesburg, 18 Sep 2007
When City Lodge Hotels, one of the largest hotel chains in South Africa, needed to upgrade its voice platform solution, the hospitality giant turned to Bytes Communication Systems to supply them with a state-of-the-art communications system that could be used in hotels across the group.
The City Lodge Hotels Group was established in 1985, and has since grown from the single hotel the group started with, to a multi-tier hotel chain listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
City Lodge Hotels now consists of six Courtyard Suite Hotels, 11 City Lodges, nine Town Lodge hotels and 14 Road Lodges spread throughout the country, and is ranked among the 250 largest hotel chains in the world.
City Lodge's existing solutions were outdated and as a result problems started to occur, and due to the age of some of the systems parts, were not always readily available.
In order to keep up with growing demand on its communications systems, City Lodge needed a new solution that would enable every one of the 40 hotels in the group to communicate using the same system, with the number of users ranging from 75 to 300 at each site, depending on the number of rooms at each hotel. The City Lodge Group will now be using the Alcatel-Lucent voice platform solutions throughout their entire group of hotels.
Says Danie Van Der Westhuizen, Account Manager for the City Lodge project at Bytes Communication Systems: "City Lodge has been a customer of BCS for quite a while, and we attribute the continued strength of our relationship to good service and account management from our side, as well as our ability to understand the clients' needs and provide them with a solution that will meet these needs."
Bytes Communication Systems is providing a solution from Alcatel-Lucent which includes the Alcatel OmniPCX Office and Alcatel OmniPCX Enterprise. Both of these solutions have the Alcatel Hotel Link embedded in them, which allows for seamless integration of the hotels' front office systems. The Enterprise solution will be implemented for the larger sites, with the Office edition working in sites with fewer rooms. OmniPCX Enterprise and OmniPCX Office will allow the City Lodge Group to take advantage of an easy to deploy, easy to manage, fully integrated, cost-effective, interactive communications.
Stuart Mattinson, Group IT Manager for City Lodge Hotels, comments: "Although we have had a longstanding relationship with Bytes Communication Systems, its continued passion and understanding of our environment has ensured that we have been able to move forward with our telecommunications infrastructure while still keeping a simplistic approach."
The City Lodge Hotels solution is a phased project that is expected to be completed by the end of 2009. The first installations will be taking place as from the end of August 2007 and be commissioned by the end of the year. When the project is completed, each hotel within the City Lodge Hotels group will be using the new Alcatel-Lucent voice solution.
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