Parc Hotel Alvisse

The Parc Hotel Alvisse 4* Superior is located in Luxembourg near the city center, the airport and the European institutions, and is the largest and most prestigious hotel complex in the Grand Duchy.  The luxury hotel welcomes its customers in a spacious, completely renovated sports and spa area and also offers numerous rooms for seminars, conferences and receptions.  The Parc Hotel Alvisse has opted for the innovaphone PBX VoIP telephone system to modernize its outdated communication system. 

Emergency Troubleshooting with an Outdated System

The Parc Hotel Alvisse was built in 1974.  Since then, its infrastructure has been constantly developed and expanded.  The fact that the old communication system was failing made it necessary to renew the telecommunications infrastructure.  At the Parc Hotel Alvisse, telephony had been managed for many years by a Siemens PBX with digital and analog telephones.  When the outdated system collapsed, the responsible IT company immediately intervened to provide emergency support to the hotel’s administration department by installing innovaphone IP222 phones, an IP800 gateway to provide PBX functionality, and an IP2000 gateway to restore PRI connections in case of emergency.

After this incident, the management of the Parc Hotel Alvisse decided to replace the telephone system.  Hotel owner Claude Alvisse explains his decision in favor of the German VoIP specialist innovaphone:  "Following this situation, we examined various options - Siemens, Post Telecom, the leading provider in Luxembourg, as well as another Luxembourg company and innovaphone.  We didn’t want a cloud or large, complex telephone system, but a communication system that was easy to manage.  Nowadays, customers hardly use hotel telephones anymore and we did not want to rewire all rooms unnecessarily.  innovaphone’s scalable, compact and serverless PBX solution best met our requirements".

Installation and Technical Challenges

The installation, which took about 2 weeks, faced a major challenge:  The distribution cabinet, which housed the cables from 330 rooms, had been installed by an electrician one floor lower. It was therefore necessary to pinpoint the 330 analog telephones in the shortest possible time in order to minimize disruption for hotel guests.  The tedious task was to identify one-by-one which telephone line ended in which room in order to ensure the correct configuration. 

The connection to the SIP provider was modernized, communication now takes place via the SIP trunk of the telephone operator, MixVoiP.  The digital system was converted to IP in order to ensure continued service for the hotel.  Two innovaphone IP811 VoIP gateways were installed in Master / Slave mode, whereby, in order to manage the registrations of the 360 telephones in the rooms, the load was distributed between the two IP811s.

As an open, manufacturer-independent solution, the innovaphone IP811 gateway accepts all end devices that use the SIP and H.323 protocols, enabling a progressive IP conversion.  The IP811 gateway establishes the connection between conventional and IP telephony and integrates all the functionalities of conventional telephony as well as the new VoIP functions:  call forward, toggle, group function, callback on busy, three-party conference, click-to-dial, access to the central company directory, etc.

The hotel was also equipped with 42 analog innovaphone IP29-8 adapters to connect analog telephones, faxes and door systems, 25 innovaphone IP111 all-round telephones for administration as well as five innovaphone IP222 design telephones with large color display and partner keys for hotel management.

Advantages of the New Solution 

Hotel staff appreciate the elegant IP222 design telephones with their large color displays and many programmable function keys.  "Our employees are very satisfied with the new system, they find it simple and practical.  In terms of maintenance and administration, administration is much easier because it is centralized on the main system (Master), with the Slave PBX replicating the configuration.  The convergence of voice and data has made our services more efficient," says Claude Alvisse.  "The cost of outgoing calls has been reduced as we switched to IP with the SIP operator MixVoip, and no longer use the old digital ISDN connection," he adds.

The decision to replace the telephone system and modernize the call management system was primarily based on economic reasons. With its decision in favor of the innovaphone system, the hotel management made a wise choice, which is also visible in other respects: IT-related telephony opens up completely new perspectives.  It creates the prerequisites for tailor-made unified communications applications in real-time that transform innovaphone’s VoIP telephone system into a future-proof and flexible communications solution.  In the longer term, this leads to improved reachability and teamwork as well as to optimized business processes.