Fixed Wireless Business

I, Hotel

The 18-month-old provider of Wi-Fi systems for (of course) hotels thinks it has an infallible formula for success, and so far has a track record to back it up.

by Gerry Blackwell of Wi-Fi Planet [August 24, 2004]

The hospitality industry continues to be a hot market for hotspot service and software providers. Add one more vendor to the increasingly crowded roster: I-hotel International, a Canadian Wi-Fi systems software, integration and management services company.

Like most vendors in this market, I-hotel believes it has an infallible formula for success. They can't all be right, of course, but I-hotel, unlike some others, does have a solid track record to back its claim—even though it's only 18 months old.

The company announced in July that it had added 14 more hotels to the list of deployed properties with its Wi-Fi-based systems—bringing the total as of late July to 71, with 7,300 guest rooms. Installations include Quality, Best Western, Holiday Inn and Days Inn properties.

"We quickly recognized that if we wanted to make our mark, we had to focus on the mid-market segment," says Sylvain Boudreau, the company's vice president of business development.

"Everybody is chasing the Deltas and Paramounts. We've stayed focused on the mid-market and we've been very successful as a result."

What are the other ingredients in the company's sure-fire success formula? One is that most of the I-hotel team—including Boudreau and founder and vice president of technology Samuel Schmidt—have deep backgrounds in the hospitality industry. They're not just technologists.

"So the first thing we bring to the table is our knowledge of the industry," Boudreau says.

This probably does count for something, but not enough on its own. More important is that the company's triple-A-billing-network management software was developed from the ground up for hotels.

In fact, the software came before the company. Schmidt began developing it as part of a freelance consulting contract for the Quebec-based Gouverneur Hotels chain. Gouverneur wanted to install a custom-built Wi-Fi access system. It had looked at offerings from wireline systems vendors but decided they were too expensive and not flexible enough.

Schmidt ended up forming I-hotel to complete development on the software as a commercial product when he realized he had come up with something that would be in demand. I-hotel used one of the Gouverneur hotels as the guinea pig during eight months of development and testing.

"That's why we've been successful, because the software was built specifically for hotels," Boudreau says. "That's where we're quite different from most of our competitors."

Then there is I-hotel's business model. The company is a one-stop shop, Boudreau stresses, and that is very appealing to hotels. I-hotel quotes an all-included price for consulting, hardware, software, installation and training.

A typical installation in a 200-room hotel with eight access points costs about $15,000. That includes a Dell server, Colubris Networks access points, and cabling between server and APs.

The hotel then owns the network and handles day-to-day management. It pays for the high-speed Internet connection—in most cases it's cable modem access from one of I-hotel's two distribution partners, Videotron (mostly in Quebec) and Cogeco (in Ontario).

I-hotel also charges a monthly fee—about $1.50 per room—that covers network maintenance, software upgrades and 24/7 toll-free telephone technical support for guests and staff, in both of Canada's official languages, French and English.

Boudreau says the fact that the network in an I-hotel installation is managed entirely from an onsite server on which the I-hotel software resides—and not from an off-site hotspot service provider's network operations center—is another important technology differentiator.

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