Stonehouse Court Hotel is a gorgeous, 36-bedroom hotel, based in the Stroud Valley and operated by Bespoke Hotels. The accommodation is housed in a stunning 17th century manor house, set in extensive grounds, providing a fantastic Destination stay for its guests. Underpinning its reputation for quality, guests naturally expect the best from its facilities and amenities, which is why Eurolink Connect is proud to have supported Stonehouse Court Hotel with high-speed internet connectivity and improved phone and ongoing IT system support.
The Challenge
For Stonehouse Court Hotel, a stunning, village location provides an idyllic country-esque stay, but also creates challenges around internet speeds and connection quality. Despite a contract for speeds of 40mbps, the hotel rarely secured more than 6mbps download speed, hindering the guest experience. Not only that, but challenges with the IT configuration meant missed booking enquiries, frequent system outages, and security concerns.
How Eurolink helped
At Eurolink, our focus in on delivering a proactive support service rather than a reactive one. This means we plan and configure a system to deliver optimum performance straightaway, as well as maintaining and updating the system to minimise problems and downtime. For Stonehouse Court, we have been able to implement some new systems and changes to immediately address many of the challenges, as well as an interim solution for the internet to increase speeds immediately, while waiting for a dedicated ethernet line to be installed after Covid-19 lockdown.
Our system solutions include:
- Proactive IT support so that the system is always optimised for peak performance. This has meant:
- Replacing obsolete or badly configured equipment to ensure maximum performance and security. Previous hardware and software had been supplied with the end-of-life Windows 7 operating system, making it unsecure for the business. These have been upgraded.
- Reconfiguring the IT system to ensure it works for the business. Historically, booking enquiries and guest emails were being automatically filtered as SPAM, resulting in missed opportunities for the business, which has now been resolved.
- Streamlining the hardware, software, and integrations to ensure there is a reliable back-up, consistent software applications across all devices, and logical configurations for the emails and domains for the business.
- Upgrading the internet provision in the short- and mid-term: historically, the hotel obtained excruciatingly slow internet speeds, despite paying for download speeds more than 6 times as fast as they were getting, leaving guests and staff with subpar performance. These speeds didn’t even improve during lockdown when the hotel was empty. Often, the hotel was forced to provide access to the business WiFi for its guests, creating a significant security weakness for the business. In the short-term, we have increased speeds to 80mbps, with full speed monitoring to alert for any issues, as well as increasing security by separating the business, guest and PDQ configurations. In the mid-term, once lockdown has lifted, this will be replaced with an ethernet lease line, giving the hotel consistent and dedicated speeds that are always maintained.
- Upgrading the phone system to increase functionality: the business phone system was on the ISDN network which is currently being phased out by BT OpenReach. We upgraded their existing system to a Panasonic NS700 with SIP trunks, enabling us to reuse the old cabling in the building without significant additional spend. As well as providing free calls to UK 01, 02, 03 & 07 numbers, the new system has also supported hotel branded handsets, one touch dialling for the reception and concierge services, on-hold information messages, and much more. The system is now more feature rich and better optimised for the hotel.
As an added benefit, our call provider Gamma is carbon-neutral, supporting Stonehouse Court with its Green Tourism initiative to reduce its environmental impact.
What the client said
Marian Jurko, General Manager, Stonehouse Court Hotel says “Moving to Eurolink Connect has given us the opportunity to work with a local IT & telecoms provider, which has delivered immediate benefits in terms of the efficiency of getting requests resolved, and also reduced costs compared with using our previous engineers. Not only that, but Eurolink has been able to deliver a significantly enhanced service for us, including better quality internet for our guests, and improved system configurations to ensure we don’t miss potential bookings from guests which previously got blocked as spam. We now have a much better system with better IT support and know that we have a proactive provider who will flex as our business changes and grows.”
Stonehouse Court Hotel
Book your luxury stay, wedding, or foodie experience with Stonehouse Court, via their website
Phone: 01453 794 950
Website: www.stonehousecourt.co.uk
Get in touch with one of the team
Everyone’s requirements are different. At Eurolink we understand this and we are passionate about delivering personal, bespoke solutions tailored to each customer’s specific requirements. Please contact us on 01453 700 800 for more information.
