If you work in the world of hospitality, you’ll be all too aware that the WiFi arms race has already begun. And that’s especially true if you operate a hotel.

Internet connectivity is no longer just ‘a like to have’, It’s an integral part of most travellers’ daily lives and a basic expectation. Which explains why so many hotel guests say that fast and secure WiFi connectivity is the most desired amenity they look for when staying away from home.

So much so, that they’re using websites like Hotelwifitest.com to get the low-down on what quality of WiFi is on offer at a hotel – and whether they’ll have to pay to get it – before making a booking. Hotel WiFi Test ranks Internet connection speeds at some of the world’s top hotels, with people running speed tests through the site while staying at the hotel in question. Reviews are aggregated to give an expected internet speed, along with a confidence score to show how thoroughly the hotel has been tested.

But the site doesn’t just showcase which hotels have the fastest WiFi. It also reveals those with slow connections.

Why the customer is WiFi King

Changing customer expectations means the pressure is on hotel operators – both big name chains and small independents – to offer a better and free WiFi service.

Whether that’s via a loyalty programme that rewards guests who book directly, rather than through third-party booking sites like Expedia.

Or by offering a good free WiFi service that’s good enough for work emails and basic collaboration, but which guests can pay to upgrade if they wish to take advantage of faster connectivity that allows them to seamlessly stream their own content.

Why?

Well, if you’re a business traveller then good, reliable WiFi is going to be a must have. Which means poor coverage, limited capacity and slow connections are all going to represents big frustrations that get in the way of being productive when on the road.

But it turns out that when it comes to WiFi, we’re all addicted. Because a survey conducted by English hotelier Roomzz reveals that 65% of hotel guests go online within seven minutes of checking in – with one-third requesting a WiFi password as soon as they arrive.

According to the study, hotel guests most frequently used WiFi to check the weather in their location, with a quarter saying they ignored the television and used WiFi to watch Netflix, Amazon Prime or other streaming services.

Going beyond WiFi – delight your guests

The good news is that today, initiating a robust WiFi experience is simplicity itself – even for small hoteliers or B&B operators. Cisco’s Mobility Express solutions, for example, can be deployed in just five minutes and without the need for dedicated IT staff and makes it easy to partition a secure guest WiFi network for guests on a single combined network that staff can use too.

Combined with Connected Mobile Experience (CMX), Cisco’s location-based solution, you can gain real-time information and analytics on your hotel’s most popular locations – front desk, restaurant, or gift shop – and guest preferences.

What’s more, you can use WiFi to enhance the guest experience by offering automated guest check-in/checkout, mobile access to housekeeping, room service and guest services. You can even send guests live hotel related updates and promotions while they’re on site – incentivising them to spend additional time and money in your facilities or rewarding regular stayers with a special treat in recognition of their continued custom.

These days every hotel needs a high performance public WiFi that delivers a fast and stable connection with easy log in, no coverage black-spots and safe web access.

And, as we’ve seen, Cisco Mobility Express and Connected Mobile Experiences can provide the analytics and insights hotel management teams need to revitalise and personalise guest engagement and business objectives.

The devastation caused by last year’s WannaCry ransomware attack on the NHS highlights the accelerating risk posed by malware.

Cyber attackers are relentless, are looking to find their way into data and networks any which way they can, and will target anyone – consumers, small businesses and large enterprises alike. Indeed, research published earlier this year found that 3 million British businesses were compromised by cyberattacks in 2016.

In this era of ever persistent threat, network security is now a top must have. But while enterprise grade firewalls and server security are all well and good, hackers will typically focus their attention on ‘endpoints’ which often sit outside the control of the corporate network – laptops, smartphones, printers and even WiFi connected CCTV cameras.

Dealing with an increasingly connected world

With employees relying on mobile devices and home computers and laptops to connect to company networks to conduct business, a centralised security solution is no longer adequate for what is an ever-shifting and undefinable security perimeter.

Endpoint security – the process of securing various endpoints on a network – is becoming vital to prevent data loss and more. No easy task when you consider how bring-your-own-device (BOYD) policies translate into increased risk for businesses of all sizes – opening the door to cyber attackers and other unwelcome onlookers using potentially compromised devices to penetrate the network.

Factor in the growing prevalence of Internet-of-Things connected devices – like that ‘smart’ fridge in your office kitchen – and you could be dealing with thousands of endpoint devices accessing the network at any given moment.

These endpoints offer attackers juicy opportunities to bypass other defences designed to keep them out – firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, or other security controls.

For businesses operating public ‘open’ Wi-Fi networks – like airports, convention centres, retail outlets or restaurants – the risks of ‘guests’ unintentionally infecting their primary network with malware or viruses increases exponentially.

What’s more, these businesses know that, for reputational damage control reasons, it’s also vital to ensure that guests connecting to their WiFi are protected from potential infiltration too.

Protect the network, protect users – defend your data

Digital transformation means what’s needed is a different approach. One that makes it easy to centrally manage and secure access to the enterprise network – and identify, contain and remediate threats faster.

Because if you can’t see all users, devices and traffic on your network, then securing the network is going to get a lot tougher.

Cisco’s Identity Services Engine (ISE) can turn the network into a sensor and enforcer. As well as providing full visibility and control of users and device on the network, ISE lets you define how users, devices and systems can talk to others – enabling you to raise the ‘network drawbridges’ to protect critical data and maintain essential services. So, in the event of an identified real-time threat you can set up policies that automatically kick all guests or BYOD users off the network, or restrict peer-to-peer traffic.

ISE helps you understand who, what, where, when and how someone or something is attaching to the network. This enables you first, decide whether that user or device should be allowed on the network. And second, what they should have access to.

All of which enables you to have a policy-based approach to defining access privileges. For example, now you can define that a mortgage broker on a corporate device can access financially regulated applications, while an enterprise IoT device – like a badge reader or that carpark CCTV camera – cannot.

What’s more, smart networks are utilising machine-learning and behavioural modelling to sense suspicious activity and outsmart emerging threats before these get out of hand. So, if an endpoint device starts behaving in a way that’s out of the norm – you get instant alerts on policy violations and compromised devices in real time.

In today’s ultra-competitive and digitally powered world, standing out from the pack and moving beyond expectations to deliver a unique customer experience may seem like a big ask.

But just recently, there’s been a quiet revolution taking place across a range of industry sectors – including healthcare, recreation, education and retail.

Say hello to mobile digital ‘wayfinding’ – a kind of digital concierge service that gives customers or service users the option of using their phone to navigate your location in a stress-free way.

Great expectations

Imagine you’re late for an appointment. Pulling into a multi-storey car park, you use your phone to connect to the car park’s public WiFi and get directions to the most convenient available parking space. Once parked, you use your phone to navigate to the closest exit or pay station. What’s the likelihood that you’ll use that car park again in the future? Pretty high, I’d say.

These days, first impressions and powerful brand connections count for a lot. Which is why organisations are embracing the latest WiFi technologies to help guide people through unfamiliar environments. Providing directional information, answers to questions or personalised content based on their known preferences or previous behaviours.

In other words, they’re using technology to transform the customer experience – solving their problems, anticipating wants and needs, directing them to points of interest – offering options along the way to make life more convenient and less stressful.

Digital wayfinding – the future is here

Thanks to integration with low cost beacon technology, today’s next-generation digital wayfinding solutions can link with a consumer’s mobile phone to put ‘turn-by-turn’ directional information directly onto the handset.

But we’re also seeing the evolution of something that’s far more powerful and personalised. Powered by the existing WiFi infrastructure, these beacons can deliver location awareness based on proximity to the device. Which means if you know where someone is – and what they are near – you can create a remarkable customer experience that’s tailored to an individual’s intent or current location. We like to call it ‘experiential wayfinding’.

It’s an approach that’s being used by universities to help students navigate their way around campus while tapping into their own personalised data – like providing students with their individualised class timetable and directions to where they need to be and at what time. On arrival at a lecture room, their attendance is instantly registered, they can view associated study notes, and more.

Similarly, airports are turning to WiFi interactive solutions to help travellers route find their way through terminals to grab connecting flights or find the nearest lounge or check in desks. And some airlines are using experiential wayfinding to give premier class passengers a truly impressive experience that includes instantly opening their electronic boarding pass as they pass through a security checkpoint.

Hospitals too are deploying wayfinding to help patients and visitors find the nearest coffee shop or locate a specific ward or service. But that’s not all. Some are also utilising beacon technology to update hospital systems the moment an outpatient arrives onsite, transmitting prompts and messages directly to their mobile device. All of which is helping to reduce the number of hospital appointments missed each year.

Capture marketing data along the way

Whether you want to use mobile wayfinding to direct customers to specific merchandise, to minimise interruptions or frustrations for visitors, encourage them to return again and again, stay longer – and even to share on social media – beaconing technology also delivers valuable data on what customers do and don’t want and their typical behaviours when visiting your business locations.

This helps turn your WiFi into a powerful marketing tool that, alongside delivering presence detection, gives you granular insights on a visitor’s dwell times, their preferred locations, frequency of visits, redemption of digital vouchers. Using this data can help you improve how you target services and give you a greater understanding of how individual customers move across all your touchpoints – onsite, mobile, website.

How many times a day do you check your smartphone? And use it to connect to the Internet?
The digital age has made us all more mobile – and wireless connectivity is the most popular method of getting online. Indeed, WiFi access is a viewed by most people as a top ‘life priority’ – regardless of whether they’re at work or play.

WiFi everywhere -it’s what customers want

If you think about it, these days we automatically expect bullet-proof WiFi availabilty wherever we spend time – at home, at school, in shopping malls, hospitals, hotels, airports, sports venues, on public transport and more.

Indeed, offering high-performance WiFi has pretty much become the ‘cost of doing business’. Just like heating and lighting, customers of retailers, restaurants and other consumer-facing organisations expect WiFi to simply ‘be there’. And will go elsewhere if their experience doesn’t come up to scratch.

The WiFi world of work

But connectivity isn’t just a vital lifestyle enabler. In the workplace, a reliable high-quality internet connection is becoming more important than ever.

Today’s workers increasingly expect to encounter highly flexible workspace and productivity options – no more being tethered to a single desk. What’s more, bandwidth hungry communication and collaboration applications are very much the name of the game for organisations looking to empower their workforce to perform.

But what happens if your wireless infrastructure isn’t up to coping with all these demands?
Classic signs it’s time for a WiFi rethink include poor coverage and drop outs, problems scaling up to cope with more and more mobile devices, slow app performance or availability…we could go on.
When users start complaining they get better connectivity at home than at work, you know you’ve got a problem.

Fast, simple, powerful WiFi

In this day and age, businesses of all shapes and sizes need an enterprise-strength WiFi infrastructure that’s scalable, won’t get overloaded when high throughput appliances like a NAS or IP cameras get added to the network, and can handle multiple users connections with ease.

The good news is it’s possible to meet burgeoning WiFi connectivity user and customer demands cost-effectively, without having to worry about the expense of ethernet cabling.

Indeed, with the right planning and the right technology it’s possible to deliver a completely wireless user experience – even if you need to support voice and video.

Solutions like Cisco Mobility Express or Cisco Meraki, for example, make it easy for small and medium-sized businesses to compete on a level playing field with much larger, big name organisations, and deliver top-notch wireless access to customers or staff.

Cisco ISE Express, for example, makes it easy to create tailored guest services quickly and easily, securely manage end points to safeguard the WiFi network and more.

IT teams get answers fast

The latest generation of solutions give today’s hard-pressed IT teams instant knowledge of everything hitting the network.

Designed to relieve the day-to-day stress of managing a WiFi network, Cisco’s Identity Services Engine (ISE) and Mobile Express makes it easy to securely take care of access management, tells you who is accessing the network and what device they’re using, profiles what applications are being used.

A rich choice of automated analytics delivers, for example, the ability to see which access points are in high demand so you can manage hot spots in real-time to ensure everyone – including guests – can access WiFi network with ease.

Marketing analytics at your finger tips

WiFi solutions like Cisco CMX and Cisco Meraki now deliver valuable data for your business managers, delivering digital insights on customers interests and preferences. All of which makes it easier to deliver a highly personalised experience for customers.

Overlaid by cloud-enabled software like Purple Wifi, your marketing teams can gain information real-time footfall, passers by, conversion and bounce rates, dwell times, return visits and frequency. And all this data can be connected to other information systems like CRM and ERP.

With WiFi now the primary platform for internet connectivity, isn’t it time to discover what the future holds for WiFi technology in your organisation?