What a hotel room phone can do besides ring

Guests arrive with their own mobiles, so the phone on the bedside table makes fewer outside calls every year. Some hotels have started to see it as a cost with a cord. That misses what the room phone has become: the one device in every room that is wired into the running of the hotel.

When room phones are part of the hotel phone system, and the phone system knows who is checked in, the handset does several jobs that have nothing to do with long-distance calls.

It reaches the right desk without a directory

Lay out your floors once and every room number becomes a working extension. Guests reach reception, the restaurant or housekeeping with a short number, and each of those can be a ring group, so the call is answered by whoever is on duty and not by one particular handset. A duty manager can answer the reception line from the mobile app anywhere on the property.

Outside lines follow the stay

In Filantis the outside line on a room phone opens at check-in and closes at check-out. An empty room cannot run up a bill, and nobody at the desk has to remember to switch anything.

Room-to-room calls are handled the same careful way. They are blocked unless the desk opens them, which protects guests from unwanted calls and still lets a family in two rooms talk to each other.

Guests set their own wake-up calls

A guest dials *51 and the time, hears it read back and goes to sleep. In the morning the system rings the room, tries again if nobody answers and tells the front desk if the guest still has not picked up. We described the whole flow in the wake-up call that never gets missed.

Housekeeping reports from the room

This is the job most hotels do not know a phone can do. A room attendant finishes cleaning, picks up the room phone, enters a PIN and reports the status. The room board at the front desk updates by itself: cleaning, ready, or waiting for inspection if you use that step.

• Nobody walks back to the desk to say a room is ready.
• The desk can sell the room minutes after it is clean, which matters on a full night.
• Each report carries the attendant and the time, so the day's work is on record.

The room phone is the only staff terminal that is already installed in every room.

Room service lands on the bill

With the restaurant module running beside the hotel, an order phoned down from a room is taken as a room-service order and charged to the guest's bill. It appears on the invoice at check-out without anyone re-typing it. Our post on taking phone orders follows that call into the kitchen.

You may not need new phones

Any standard IP desk phone works as a room phone. Existing analogue room phones can stay as well, connected through a small adapter box, which is often the cheapest way to bring an older property onto the system. And the front desk, bookings and guest bills work even before a single room phone is connected, so you can start there and add rooms floor by floor.

The hotel pack is on the pricing page. To see the room board with your own floor plan, create a free workspace and number a few rooms.