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Hospitality PMS Integration

Guest networks as a revenue line — walled-garden entry, metering, and posting marina shore power to a room account.

Also known as PMS, BBSM, Walled Garden, Guest Access, Port Hopping, Guest Billing

Left to right is time. Each row is one of the 3 disciplines this one worked alongside, ordered so kindred disciplines sit next to each other rather than alphabetically — a landscape only means anything if neighboring rows belong together. Height is the work running in that domain in that year, weighted by what failure would have cost — life-safety ×3, a statutory obligation ×2.2, the estate itself ×1.5, an evaluation ×1. Every project declares which of those it was, so each ridge traces to an entry you can open and disagree with. Only the work that used this technology is counted, so what shows here is the company it kept rather than the record around it. Height and color are on the record-wide scale rather than this page’s own, so a modest estate draws a modest landscape and any two of these pages can be read against each other.

Designed the property management system architecture and integration for Kerzner International’s resort properties, Atlantis in the Bahamas and properties in Mexico among them, tying the wireless network and building systems into the PMS so that guest internet access, and shore power and services for yachts in the marina, could be authenticated, metered and posted to an account.

That included building the walled gardens: the page a customer is presented with first, where they enter their details and are charged before anything else opens up.

Hospitality is an unusual environment to design a network for, because the network is a revenue line rather than an overhead, and a captive guest who cannot get online complains to the front desk rather than to a help desk.

Below the configuration screens

Most PMS integration is configuration. One engagement was not: the Rosen Hotels work in Orlando was development in the BBSM software development kit and its SQL schema, carrying the guest transaction end to end — room and account validation, payment selection across card, room charge and negotiated rates, third-party processing, device authorization, and the posting of charges back into the PMS, with the disconnect capturing the device address and closing the billing record.

Two requirements are worth naming because they are what the schema has to be shaped around. A guest who moves from the wired room port to the wireless network has to keep one session rather than pay twice. And a rate negotiated at one property has to be honored at another, which is the difference between a billing system for a hotel and a billing system for an estate.

Applied in

Career

Attested by

  • Cisco BBSM Certification2002 · SupersededBuilding Broadband Service Manager — subscriber provisioning, walled-garden capture and billing, down to custom development in its SDK and SQL schema.