French hotel chain in Lithuania upgrades security system for enhanced customer experience

Located within walking distance of the historic old town, close to both railway and bus stations and with easy highway access to Kaunas International Airport, Kaunas is the second-largest city in Lithuania. The country is the largest of the three Baltic States, and is situated along the south-eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, to the east of Sweden and Denmark.

The new hotel features 125 air conditioned guest rooms and, as the latest addition to the Ibis chain, is part of Accor's leading economy hotel brand. Ibis has expanded continuously and is now Europe's largest economy hotel chain and the world's fourth largest in its category with 933 hotels and more than 113,000 rooms across 53 countries in all five continents.

Challenge
Safety and security is very much a focus for hotels, so with specific regard to its guest room security the challenge for the Ibis Kaunas Centre hotel was to find a reliable security system that would not only complement the modern aesthetics of the building and its design, but operate seamlessly and discreetly in the background while giving guests reliable, unobtrusive 24/7 protection.

Agnieszka Filipowicz, Salto Business Development Manager Eastern Europe, says "Hotels probably have one of the toughest security tasks of all. On the one hand they have their own guests staying in the building but added to this are lots of other people they don't know including delivery people, maintenance people and non-residents coming in to use bars, restaurants, conference rooms, business services, sporting facilities and more.

So working in consultation with the hotel's owner Donetas Karciauskas and local Salto business partner Eurospynos, we designed a highly secure and flexible electronic access control system for all of their guest room needs installing 125 Aelement locks, 125 Energy Saving Devices, 4 XS4 locks, 4 online wall readers and our HAMS 100 software synchronized to their OPERA PMS system."

Solution
Tadas Cepulis of Salto partner Eurospynos says "Aelement has been developed with the needs of hotels in mind and features a range of hospitality-specific applications including the ability to control the security of the entire hotel from a single location. This includes granting access privileges to individual guest rooms and gathering audit trail data from every door in real time – all without leaving the front desk. Other benefits for the hotel include instant room move and instant extended stay abilities as well as lost card cancellation, intrusion alarm, door ajar alarm, remote opening, real time audit trail, passage mode activation for meeting rooms and automated low battery reporting."

And not only that but Aelement is also NFC enabled. So when this technology becomes standard on smartphones in the near future guests will be able to use their NFC enabled smartphones to emulate a normal Mifare smart card turning it into their hotel room key. 

Result
Filipowicz comments, "After a considerable period researching the available applications and products that he thought may be suitable, the owner of the hotel chose Salto Systems for their reputation as manufacturers of advanced technology security solutions to the hotel and hospitality industry and the Aelement product in particular for its sleek looks and cutting edge design. He knows it to be the best on the market and, as he says himself, I've opened Ibis Hotel and my main priorities were uncompromised security and maximum convenience to hotel guests. Also maximum energy saving. And I was able to achieve this by choosing Salto."

Finally Aiste Cistoviene, Front Desk Manager of the ibis Kaunas Center hotel, says "To ensure our guests are secure during their stay with us, we wanted a stylish high performance locking system that not only looked good, but also offered us the latest technology and was capable of growing with us in the future. Salto has provided us with all of this and more."