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With its 157 suites and guest rooms, the Marriott Grand Hotel Flora is a top-class venue in the heart of Rome that attracts international leisure travelers as well as corporate guests. Located on the famous Via Veneto, it partakes in the street’s unique ambiance while at the same time offering a stylish retreat from its hustle and bustle. High tech hides behind its classy Art Nouveau façade: In recent years, a new structured Ethernet cabling was deployed in all rooms, allowing scalable services in view of growing Internet usage and bandwidth requirements.

Last winter, the owners of Marriott Grand Hotel Flora commissioned Swisscom to perform an in-depth IT architecture review leading to the harmonization all connectivity services property-wide, both guest-facing and administrative. Moreover, Swisscom was selected to become the hotel’s exclusive conference technology provider and to install its web-enabled IPTV solution, known as ConnectedHotel TV, in all suites and guest rooms.

“Working with Swisscom marks a turning point in how we deal with technology”, says Cesare Naldi, co-owner of the Marriott Grand Hotel Flora. “At a time when guests’ technology needs are becoming increasingly varied and complex; when the boundaries between television and the Internet are blurring; and the legal complexities of providing Internet access become very time consuming and difficult to manage, it simply does not make sense for us to do things ourselves, or to piece services together from different providers. Swisscom delivers all data, connectivity and entertainment services as a one-stop shop.”

Following the hotel’s request for a holistic service concept, Swisscom provides wired and wireless Internet access not only in all guest rooms and public areas, but also to the hotel’s back-office. To supply sufficient bandwidth, Swisscom manages a central fiber connection to the hotel from its wide area network partner enterprise Fastweb. The central data line branches into three distinct and secured data lines for each of the guest rooms, the conference space and the back-office. Swisscom oversees all bandwidth needs on-property and can swiftly respond to specific usage patterns. For instance, the guest rooms will receive most of the available bandwidth in the evening hours while the back-office and conference areas may be prioritized at daytime and during the early morning hours, when the electronic closing of the previous day business occurs.

“Swisscom’s intelligent bandwidth management enables us to save money and to simplify our operations”, attests Cesare Naldi. “Moreover, we are now more flexible when it comes to usage peaks. Our separate DSL lines belong to the past.”

The Rome Marriott Grand Hotel Flora is also among the first venues in Italy to offer Swisscom’s ConnectedHotel TV which recently won the TopHotel award in Germany. Designed to work without set-top boxes and HDMI cabling, this ground-breaking solution allows front-desk staff to display a welcome video and personalized messaging on the LG room TV screens, while offering supreme interactivity, a wide program choice and a full high definition viewing experience to the guest.

“It is a great pleasure for us to service a property as prestigious as the Rome Marriott Grand Hotel Flora“, comments Simone Colombo, Sales Director Italy for Swisscom Hospitality Services. “The hotel represents the highest profile in terms of guest expectations and follows a very progressive approach to hotel operations. At the Rome Marriott Grand Hotel Flora, we are demonstrating our full capabilities as a network provider, system integrator and solution provider to meet the hotel’s particular requests in terms of guest services and hotel branding.”