Just wondering if anyone that reads these forums is an approved vendor for Best Western hotels. I have a location that is being forced to upgrade their wifi for no decent reason since they’re currently on wifi 5. However, the company that gave them a quote is using expensive brands and I’d rather see them purchase Ubiquiti or other brands without licenses. Let me know if you’re approved and I’ll pass on the info for you to provide a quote and take a shot at the account.
I was in the hotel MSP space for a few years before COVID. I don’t have specific knowledge of Best Western. But every hotel chain has specific standards as to what vendors are approved and why. For example with Marriott, they have a demo lab where MSPs have to bring their proposed combinations of firewall/switches/APs and configurations to show that it meets the standards - and the approval list for hardware vendors only get something added to it if an MSP wants to do the extra work to show that the hardware meets requirements as well. Other hotel chains in the industry I’m aware of, but not sure whether I can name publicly, standardized on only using Meraki so that their corporate HQ could see the client health metrics from every hotel directly, even if franchised.
Whomever has the official business relationship with Best Western will be able to get their approved list of MSPs and hardware vendors.
Ah, I didn’t think about the possibility that the chain forces the vendor to use a certain brand rather than just saying we trust certain vendors to make everything work well. I’m just trying to find someone willing to provide a quote and a support contract. I wish I was in the position to care about doing it.
If a hotel guest has a bad experience, yes they may write a review specific to the individual hotel, but it brings down the name of the brand as a whole. And in the past decade, wifi has become a major visibility point for guests, and from what I was told the #1 reason for low score reviews. In the hands of an experienced engineer, Unifi can provide an experience equal to the enterprise brands, but it is much more fiddly than Ruckus or Aruba or Meraki or… Also consider that with Unifi the maximum warranty is two years and only one year if bought from a distributor/reseller, the more expensive brands almost universally have lifetime warranties. For an engaged and value-oriented individual, small business, or MSP, they’ll look at it and realize that having to buy a handful of replacement APs in years 3-5 is saving money overall, but when you get to the scale of tens of thousands of APs across hundreds of hotels you just want to have a replacement shipped with next-day delivery, and with support that will actually pick up the phone in minutes 24/7 to validate and process immediately. Consider that depending on the installation density, a down AP might mean the signal in one or more rooms drops below the acceptable strength.