Mandarin Oriental

First-class Wi-Fi for First-class Hotel 

The Mandarin Oriental is designed to cater for the needs of senior business and luxury leisure travellers. The hotel aims to make its guests feel at home as soon as they walk into reception. That means offering them every service that they may have at their fingertips in their own homes, including fast, secure and reliable Wi-Fi to support every device that they might care to use during their stay.

To meet this expectation, Mandarin Oriental needed a Wi-Fi solution to support heavy internet use, such as video calling and gaming, and had to ensure that there were no coverage black spots anywhere in the hotel. Moreover, the hotel needed to run a range of corporate applications across the same network, such as Point of Sale (POS) systems and mobile check-in, and provide connectivity to public spaces such as meeting rooms, ballrooms and, of course, the hotel reception.

The Challenges

Given Mandarin Oriental’s target market, guests expect easy internet access and exceptional speeds. The hotel had been providing Wi-Fi for guests for over ten years, originally choosing a consumer solution to provide connectivity. However, this did not deliver the stability and reliability expected of it, so the Mandarin Oriental turned to an enterprise solution. While this worked well, they found that the costs were too high and that the solution was rather over-engineered.