Hotel, reception and waiting area

Whoever walks in is looking for just one thing in the first few seconds: confirmation of being in the right place. That does not take much. A screen in the lobby carrying the name of the house, listing the day's events with room and start time and showing reception hours settles ninety per cent of the questions otherwise asked at the desk.

Restraint here is not a style but a strategy. A reception is not an advertising space. As soon as screens in the entrance show third-party advertising, they lose their role as signposts. Your own offers may appear, but as a note rather than an advertisement: the terrace is open, the restaurant takes reservations.

Outside meeting and seminar rooms, a small display replaces the paper signs somebody has to print and clip on every morning. It shows the room name, the current booking, the title of the event and the next free slot. The data comes straight from the calendar system, usually via the room mailboxes in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.

Three things decide how useful it is. First, colour at a distance: green and red at the edge of the sign answer the question «free or occupied» from five metres without anybody reading the text. Second, on-the-spot booking. A button for «occupy the room for thirty minutes» and another that releases an unclaimed reservation after ten minutes free up more capacity in busy buildings than any additional room. Third, calm. A door sign must not flash, must not beep and must not glow at night – it hangs in the corridor, often next to bedrooms.

We almost always solve the power supply with PoE: one network cable carrying data and power, no socket beside the door, no trunking in the marble.

Hotel TV is the only screen in the building the guest operates alone and at leisure. It should work in this order: immediately understandable, then useful, informative only last. The welcome screen names the guest and the key details of the stay, after which a plain menu leads onwards.

With streaming, the delicate point is not the technology but the accounts. A guest signs in to an app, departs and stays signed in; the next one sees somebody else's profiles and can order. That is why checkout has to include automatic sign-out from all services and a reset of the device – triggered by the hotel software, not by housekeeping. Under the revised data protection act, record which guest data reaches the television and how long it stays there.

At the DIY store there is a television with the same diagonal, and it looks the same. The difference only shows up in operation, and it shows up in every room simultaneously.

Cloning is the practical heart of it. You set up one device completely, save the profile and push it to all the other rooms – with eighty rooms, that is the difference between an afternoon and a week. And the volume limit prevents the most common complaint in the house: the neighbour watching a film at midnight.

A hotel with a hundred rooms operates a hundred devices that load content and distribute programmes. We put room televisions, door signs and lobby screens on their own VLAN, separated from the guest wifi and the administrative network. That way guests never reach the control system, and an overloaded guest wifi in the evening does not confuse the door signs.

Distributing channels over IP has largely replaced the old coaxial cabling. It saves the second cable run during a refit and makes rooms easy to retrofit, but it assumes a properly planned network. Picture dropouts in the room are, to the guest, a shortcoming of the house, not of the network.

Waiting areas are everywhere: at the dentist, at the residents' registration office, at the garage, in a car dealership showroom. Anyone sitting there has one question in mind: how much longer? Everything that answers that question gets read. Everything else is trimming.

That is why the queue system comes before the programme. A visible number, the current position and an honest statement of the waiting time take the tension out of the situation. In one municipal administration we put the queue number large on the left and the information small on the right; afterwards hardly anybody came to the counter to ask whether they had been forgotten. The rest of the surface may explain: services few people know about, how a treatment proceeds, opening hours over the holidays.

On sound, a clear position: in waiting areas it stays off. People sit there involuntarily and sometimes tense, and they cannot escape the noise. Films run silently with on-screen text, and where sound is necessary – a name called out in a dealership – a short signal tone is enough. If music plays anyway, it has to be registered with SUISA; the tariff applies to a screen in a waiting area too.

In hospitality no installation fails on the technology but on the duty roster. Reception changes, the season changes, and whatever cannot be done in five minutes between two arrivals gets left. That is why we let as much as possible come from the calendar and the hotel software.

Two rules carry the operation through the year. First, the change of season as an appointment in the calendar: winter and summer versions are built once and then simply switched over. Second, the languages. German and English are compulsory, French depending on the guest profile, and translation is done by people who speak the language. A clumsy greeting in the guest's mother tongue is worse than a clean one in English.