HDTV in a Luxury Suite

Every TV system customer wants
good quality products for their setup
but there‘s a group of customers that
are doubly interested in the best possible
product quality: and that would
be hotels since they are themselves
dependant on their customers. Luxury
hotels would only be satisfied with high
quality products since the guests that
stay in these kinds of hotels would naturally
only want the best. One of the
best hotel chains in the world are the
luxury hotels operated by the Mandarin
Oriental Hotel Group. Some of these
hotels are operated entirely by this
group while some of the other hotels
are operated in conjunction with partners.
Either way, this hotel group places
the highest value on providing the
most perfect service and this includes
the TV service for their guests. But how
do the TV channels find their way to the
high-end devices in the guest rooms?
Currently the Mandarin Oriental Hotel
Group consists of 45 hotels: 19 in Asia,
14 in the Americas and 12 in Europe.
The group started out with two special
hotels: the Mandarin Hotel in Hong
Kong that opened in 1963 and the acquisition
of the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok
in 1974. With this, two of the best
hotels in the world now belonged to the
group upon which the owners built on:
additional luxury hotels were continuously
opened in the most important cities
in the world. In 1990 came the Mandarin
Oriental hotel in Munich that can
be found in a building that was erected
in 1880. This building was originally
built as an opera house. Today the hotel
has 73 luxury guest rooms and suites.
Mirko Menzel is the hotel‘s IT Manager
and he tells us where the guests
of this luxury hotel in Munich come
from: „20% of our guests each come
from the USA, the CIS countries as well
as the Middle East. Roughly 5% come
from China.“ For the guests that come
from the USA, the hotel offers Englishlanguage
TV channels; for those guests
from the CIS countries, the hotel has
Russian-language channels available.
Especially challenging up until now has
been making Arabic channels available,
but not any more. „Recently we completely
updated our entire TV system
and setup satellite dishes for six satellite
positions“, we learn from Mirko
Menzel. „Now we can receive the BADR
and NILESAT satellites with their numerous
Arabic-language TV channels.“
Before the conversion to the new TV
system, the hotel was only able to offer
180 TV channels to their guests, now
it‘s 264. „Naturally, we could incorporate
more than 1000 TV channels but
this wouldn‘t make any sense for our
guests. We chose only the best channels
in terms of content and technology.
Shopping channels, for example,
are not really interesting to our guests
and have been omitted.“ This results in
the hotel being able to offer more than
45 HDTV channels. „Each guest room
is equipped with a B&O HDTV device;
suites have two TV units installed.“ So
the hotel has 85 TVs in operation in its
73 rooms. „The suites have big screen
55“ TVs while the rooms have 33“ models.“
A highlight is the inclusion of PayTV
channels. Mirko Menzel: „Our guests
are especially interested in sports programming.
We have contracted with
several PayTV providers and offer their
content to our guest rooms.“ Mirko
Menzel has yet another highlight to tell
us about: „Since our guests come from
all over the world, we pay particular
close attention to their native language
when they place a reservation. When
they arrive at the hotel, the menu on
the TV in their room is already preprogrammed
for their language.“ This
pleases the Arabic guests to have the
TV menu in Arabic. „We can set up the
■
A look at the hotel's rooftop terrace.
The satellite dishes can be seen in the
background; they receive a total of
six satellite positions and provide the
international guests of the hotel with a
huge selection of international HDTV
programming for their enjoyment.
150 TELE-audiovision International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine — 05-06/2014 — www.TELE-audiovision.com