Originally Posted by
milestraveler
When this first came up, I kept thinking "power outages happen; perhaps not everyday, but often enough that you should have a reasonable contingency plan in place".
View From the Wing just posted a trip report that offers an example of doing this right in a place where power outages happen more often.
http://boardingarea.com/viewfromthew...e-hyatt-world/
"The hotel, being in Chennai, occasionally loses power. And by occasionally I mean somewhere between every other day and twice a day. When that happens you just wait a few seconds and the hotel’s in-hour generators kick in. There’s even a sign in the elevator telling you this is normal. ... The power outage never did last even 30 seconds at a time."
All hotel property management systems and networking equipment is on a UPS. That's been a standard in the industry since the 1990s.
However, now that a lot of the systems are 'in the cloud', it's not just lack of power that can kill the system, but Internet too. And Internet problems somewhere down the line can be just as bad as a problem at the property itself. And unfortunately, the geniuses who created this single-point-of-failure IT infrastructure have ZERO to say about backup or failover plans when things go wrong.
India is a different place. Even my in-laws place has a whole house back up UPS since the power goes out so much, with instant cutover. So these systems are common and cheaper in places like India. The same systems here in the western world cost a lot more, are regulated more rigorously, and are built to be even more bullet-proof. But it's also why you only see them at large office complexes and hospitals.
I think the solution to the problem of power loss for a hotel is two-fold. One, the property has to have properly working UPS systems on their property management system, key encoder, and networking equipment including the Internet gateway device. Second, each hotel brand needs to make their property management systems able to operate autonomously at the property level in case they are disconnected from the 'mother ship'. This way, it's business as usual except for centrally made reservations, which can be sent via an alternate method (like this ancient outdated method called a PHONE CALL--yes, we're paying you franchisors hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, so call us when we have problems like this rather than turning your backs to us). Once the power is restored, the system should also be able to automatically and correctly sync all the data, so that duplicate reservations, check-ins and the like are eliminated.
This is all easily done with current technology. It's nothing new, it's just not being done--at least at Wyndham properties. And mainly because of number 2. Most properties already have UPSs in place for number 1.