Hotels and hospitality
One duty manager, several entrances, and a team that changes faster than the training does.
General managers, operations directors and group estates teams
Where the operating reality decides what will actually be used.
A hotel runs twenty-four hours with a skeleton team for eight of them. A restaurant’s busiest hour is when its most junior staff are on the floor. Agency and seasonal cover means the person dealing with an incident may have started that week.
So a system that needs training will not be used, and a system that needs somebody to be at a particular desk will not be answered. What works in hospitality is what works without either.
What hospitality teams actually deal with
Back of house
Where most unrecorded access happens, and where deliveries arrive at six.
Night cover
One manager, several entrances, and a phone.
Lone workers
Housekeeping on an empty floor, a night porter, a final walk round.
Aggressive guests
Where discretion matters more than volume.
Medical emergencies
In a function room, at capacity.
Theft
From rooms, from stores, and from the car park.
Function rooms
Which are where a qualifying event would happen.
Multi-property
A group office that currently rings round.
Turnover
The real problem, and the one nobody sells to.
Four things
Discreet alerting
Most hospitality incidents should not be announced to the room. A phone alert is the quiet option a PA system cannot be.
Doors that manage themselves
Back of house, plant and stores controlled by credential rather than by a key on a hook.
An intercom that follows the shift
Answered by whoever is on, not by whoever is at a desk.
One login across properties
A group office that can see any property without ringing it.
Cameras that suit the room
A hotel lobby is a design environment as well as a security one, and the hardware has to be liveable with.
- Discreet form factors. Mini and dome models that do not dominate a ceiling.
- Search rather than scrub. Find a guest or a vehicle by description in seconds.
- Share a clip properly. A logged link to the police rather than a memory stick.
- No recorder in the back office. Which is the room that gets broken into.
The problem underneath all the others
A hotel that trains its team thoroughly in March has a materially different team by August. Procedures decay because people leave, and no amount of laminating fixes it.
That is an argument for systems that work without training — a door that behaves correctly whoever is on shift, an intercom that routes to the phone in somebody’s pocket, a visitor and contractor record that exists whether or not anybody remembered the book. It is not an argument for buying everything, and we will say which of it you actually need.
A venue has two security problems and they need different answers
Guests must never feel watched, and staff areas, cellars, plant rooms and back doors must never be unwatched. The same platform can do both; the design is what keeps them apart.
Questions from people in your position
Will it work across our whole group?
Is it discreet enough for a lobby?
Start with a survey, not a quotation.
We walk the site, look at what you already have, and tell you what would genuinely help — including where the answer is that you do not need anything.
Book a free site survey Call 01727 822 833Tell us about the site
Send us a few details and an engineer — not a call centre — will come back to you within one working day.
This is not a monitoring centre
If you are dealing with an incident now, call 999. This line is monitored during office hours.