Six Hotels, 1,309 Rooms, One Vendor

Citymax has built a reputation on a warm, family atmosphere at an accessible price point — which means high occupancy, high guest turnover and travellers who expect the WiFi to simply work, whether they're here for business or a holiday.

The difficulty is that a hotel is not one environment. A guest floor, a restaurant, a leisure area and a conference room each place completely different demands on a network: different densities, different session lengths, different applications. Designing for the average across all four gets you a network that is wrong everywhere.

On top of that, guests move constantly — lobby to lift to corridor to room to pool — and expect the connection to follow without re-authenticating. Meanwhile the hotel's own systems and staff traffic share the same building, and a hotel carries real responsibility for keeping guest data separate and secure.

• Guest rooms, catering, leisure and conference areas each needing different coverage
• Heavy guest turnover, with bandwidth-hungry applications competing
• Seamless roaming required as guests move through the property
• Guest, staff and office traffic needing genuine separation
• Six properties across four emirates, managed as one estate

Not every property needed the same intervention, and we didn't sell one. Three hotels received a complete wireless refurbishment. The other three, where the underlying infrastructure was sound, needed control over how bandwidth was being used rather than new hardware. Both scopes run on the same managed platform, so the group sees one estate rather than two projects.

Our engineers built a theoretical model of access point placement for each property first, then went room by room adjusting the equipment and measuring actual signal levels rather than trusting the model. That is slower on paper and considerably faster in practice, because it removes the re-work that follows a design validated only on a drawing.

The access points use built-in smart antennas that adjust channel and power automatically, so guest rooms, restaurants and meeting rooms hold full signal without manual tuning as conditions change. They're ceiling-mounted and finished to sit inside the hotel's interior design rather than on top of it — which matters more to a hotel than most vendors acknowledge. Because each unit carries a large client load, fewer were needed overall, which brought down both hardware and installation cost.

Authentication is where the guest experience is really decided. Guests authenticate against the hotel PMS or through a form tied to the membership system, so access is legitimate from the source. Staff use a different method entirely, keeping the office network and the guest network genuinely separate. Identity-based security then separates guests, employees and partners at the traffic level, with voice and video recognised and prioritised so a video call survives a busy evening.

• Per-room modelling and signal measurement, not floor-plate assumptions
• Smart-antenna access points auto-adjusting channel and power
• Ceiling-mounted and finished to disappear into the hotel interior
• PMS-integrated and membership-linked guest authentication
• Separate authentication for staff, isolating office from guest network
• Voice and video prioritised through deep packet inspection

All six properties are now managed from a single platform. For a group operating across four emirates, that is the difference between six separate IT relationships and one — configuration, monitoring and reporting happen centrally, and problems are visible before a guest reports them at reception.

Choosing a single vendor for the whole estate removed the integration risk that usually sits between hardware suppliers, installers and support contracts. Every component was designed to work with the others because it came from the same place, which is what made 635 access points across six buildings a 45-man-day job rather than a year-long programme of coordination.

• 635 access points across 1,309 rooms and six properties
• Full signal in every space type — rooms, restaurants, leisure and conference
• Seamless roaming, with terminals auto-selecting the best signal
• Guest and office networks separated by authentication method and policy
• One centralised platform managing the entire group estate