Technology for present and future

By: Hotel and Restaurant Management

It is located throughout the Mexican Pacific and has 3/4 of a mile of beach in Banderas Bay, 1,480 rooms, a golf course designed by Jim Lipe, spa with 40 cabins and all services; gym, 28 restaurants, café and bars, 14 convenience stores, wet areas, as well as rooms for events, conventions and wedding planning.

Due to the extension of this hotel and its large number of dependencies and employees, it became necessary to install an information system that would provide an integral solution to the establishment in all its areas. In such a way that the hotel management decided to implement Innsist 8, a platform based on state-of-the-art technology that allows the user a greater fluidity in the information between the departments to provide a quality service as a guest deserves.

In TCA Software Solutions, the company that develops the system, they explain that this solution is defined as a management by modules, which include the main areas that the entire hotel operates. The platform can be adapted and communicated with any other product (whether software or hardware) in the hotel market.

Today and tomorrow
But not only the current extension of the Mayan Palace Nuevo Vallarta Hotel made it necessary to implement the solution, the long-term plans of the establishment have made Innsist 8 configured as a solution that will be maintained in the future.

The hotel currently has 1,480 rooms, but its expansion plans are presented for a hotel complex with 2,000 rooms by the end of 2009 and 3,500 budgeted within the next few years.

Armando Araujo, marketing manager of TCA, Mexico, comments that "to support this growth that involves several properties and multiple consumption centers and stores, it is necessary to have a robust and scalable solution, for this reason the characteristics of architecture and technological infrastructure of Innsist version 8 are useful in the expansion plans, because being accessible via LAN and / or WAN, it supports the increase in users and workstations and simply adds computing power in the same facility as required."

Overview
The Innsist software has a series of products that have options for each department of a hotel, additionally there are within the system consultation reports, which by their nature it is necessary to be located in all modules so that users have easy and quick access to information without having to resort to other departments. The products offered by the system are: Front Office, Telephony, Points of Sale, Back Office, Logo Shop, Spa, Internet and Business Intelligence and Interfaces.

TCA also explains that Innsist version 8 has service-based architecture (SOA), therefore, when installing an Innsist application server in a locality, these can be used by users from anywhere in the world through the Internet with fast and content-rich screens.

At the Mayan Palace Nuevo Vallarta Hotel, the appropriate systems for each of them were implemented in the different areas, such as:

• Innsist Front Office: which covers reservations, reception and cashier, housekeeper, night audit, shift manager, telephony and sales.

• Innsist Spa: This product focuses on the management of cabins and therapists, gym admissions, and wet areas.

• Innsist POS: takes care of the point of sale for restaurants and bars.

• Innsist Logo Shop: implemented at the point of sale for convenience stores.

• Interfaces with GSS (Guest Service Systems): pricing, phone call management, voice mail and Internet in rooms.

• Integration with reservation center and system for golf courses.
  

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With this infrastructure, 300 simultaneous user sessions are served in 544 workstations with high transactional load -more than 900 check-ins and check-outs on average on weekends-, allowing the hotel to have some benefits such as integration between the areas of the complex, administrative control, improvement in internal mission-critical processes, technological infrastructure that enables a projection of growth in the short, medium and long term, ability to serve a greater number of guests, integration of hardware and software external to the system to control critical processes of operation and administration, flexibility when running Innsist in local network or Internet and security in the management of information.

Good decisions
The developer company affirms that good results have been obtained after the establishment of the software, thanks to the timely decisions of the Mayan Group and the expert implementation consultants who intervened in the project.

During the installation phase, a process of awareness and training of the staff of the Mayan Palace Nuevo Vallarta Hotel was carried out in nine weeks, during which time activities were carried out to review hardware and software on servers, placement of the different Innsist version 8 systems, interfaces with external hardware and software and supervision of the operation in each of the areas to ensure the expected objective.