Florida Hotels Upgrade Tech Amenities To Attract Biz

<B>Florida Hotels Upgrade Tech Amenities To Attract Biz</B>

By Rowland Stiteler

Business travelers heading to Florida will find a vast cyber-movement taking place throughout the hospitality and meetings industries, as hotels and convention centers across the state bulk up their technological offerings.

For instance, travelers checking in to the Astor Hotel, a plush, Art Deco boutique resort in Miami Beach's trendy South Beach district, now get more than just a card key to one of the historic property's 64-year-old rooms--they get laptop cards as well: A small, electronic, plug-in card that enables high-speed, wireless Internet access that travelers can use as they sit sipping pi&ntilde;a coladas around the swimming pool. And all the guest rooms have been set up for the new standard in Florida: Internet access at speeds more than 50 times faster than what you can get over a standard telephone modem.

Management at the hotel considers its foothold in the forefront of the cyber-Florida movement to be as important as the physical address that puts it in the heart of the upscale Miami lodging market. "We get a lot of executives from the recording industry from California, from the financial business in New York and business travelers from Europe and South America--people who expect you to have high-speed Internet access; it's something they require," said Larry Carrino, a spokesman for the hotel. "I don't think there is any question that to be competitive in Florida these days, especially if you market to business travelers, you need to offer all the high-tech options you can get your hands on."

While the extent of Internet access options at the Astor Hotel puts the property in the vanguard--wireless Internet access is still the exception to the rule in most Florida hotels--the Astor does represent something of a microcosm of the lodging and convention industry in the Sunshine State as a whole. Hotels, conference centers and convention halls throughout Florida have spent millions in the past year, literally laying miles of fiber-optic and copper cables because, industry veterans say, the market demands it.

"Today, as a matter of course, meeting planners are asking for technology that didn't even exist a year ago, and we've got it," said Jim Pribyl, director of convention services for the 778-room Renaissance Orlando Resort at SeaWorld, one of three Orlando resorts in the Marriott corporate family to install a new, high-speed STSN system.

The system offers the type of ultra-fast Internet access that one typically finds with the T-1 connections that have gone into numerous hotels and convention halls in Florida--anywhere from 50 to 300 times faster than a standard 56K telephone modem can provide.

"One of the primary benefits of this fast new system is that it has allowed a lot of tech-oriented meeting groups to leave a lot at home when they come to meet here," Pribyl said. "It used to be necessary to bring boxloads of disks and CD-ROMs and files to make the kind of multimedia presentations that corporate groups want to make to their attendees. But now it becomes feasible to leave all that behind at the office and simply download it over the Internet. All you have to bring is your laptop."

Pribyl said corporate groups, including those from Pfizer and Deloitte & Touche, have used the multiple access points in the hotel's 45 meeting rooms to set up their own conference networks at which attendees can follow presentations being made, check information about the conference events schedule and otherwise gather conference information.

"What makes the system even more useful is that all the guest rooms are wired for STSN," said Frank Denson, audiovisual manager for the hotel, "so conference attendees can have virtually any kind of network among themselves that they want." Denson said a high-point of the system is its simplicity. Guests can hook up their laptops to the system through either an Ethernet card or a USB port. A CD-ROM disk, contained in a start-up pack in every guest room, automatically configures a desktop computer to be compatible with the STSN system, and hotel guests can use their browser of choice to surf the 'Net. The hotel offers its own secure Web site from which guests can check or pay their hotel bills, and schedule services or make reservations.

Meeting rooms and exhibit halls wired with fiber-optic and other high-volume transmission cables become paramount for such planners as Virginia "Gin" Roberts, director of meetings and travel for the National Industrial Transportation League, which incorporated the Broward County (Fort Lauderdale) Convention Center's newly upgraded connectivity into its plans for the group's 93rd annual meeting.

"What you've got now is a standard by which most people are using laptops with Microsoft Powerpoint to make their presentations," she said. "And we typically have exhibitors who use the Internet in their booths in a variety of ways, so high-speed connectivity becomes very important."

The Broward County Convention Center, already partially rewired with fiber-optic cable for high-speed data, audio and video transmission, is in the midst of an extensive communications upgrade that is part of the expansion of the center to 600,000 square feet.

When the new expansion is completed in the summer of 2001, the entire building will have been wired for high-speed Internet access, and the center will have full capabilities for videoconferencing and satellite uplink and downlink operations.

"We really feel that state-of-the-art Internet capabilities are important now and certainly will be even more so in the future," said Dennis Edwards, vice president and director of marketing for the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau. "The technology is a wise investment at this point."

That also is the prevailing logic at the Miami Beach Convention Center, where a $3 million communications upgrade is underway, with completion scheduled for September 2001. The upgrade will make all meeting rooms and exhibit areas of the 500,000-sq.-ft. building not only high-speed Internet-friendly, but telecommunications-friendly as well.

The project, which involves extensively wiring the building with fiber-optic and high-capacity telephone cable, will give the exhibit hall 1,200 individual phone lines, which can support 2,000 phone hookups, giving exhibitors individual voicemail, caller ID, call forwarding, conference calling and ISDN Internet hookups at points every 30 feet throughout the exhibit areas.

Doug Tober, general manager of the convention center, said completion of the upgrade will come in time for several high-tech-oriented trade shows scheduled for Miami Beach in the fall of 2001, including Xplor International and the School & Home Office Products Association show. "We are excited to move forward with this much-needed project, bringing the Miami Beach Convention Center to a competitive level with regard to meeting technologies," he said.

Fort Lauderdale-based planner Michele Thompson, president of Outstanding Events Inc., put together a technology-oriented conference at the Miami Beach Convention Center last spring, in which her client elected to have an outside contractor set up a temporary network of high-speed access terminals in the exhibit area. "It was something the conference really needed in order to function, but it was an expense to have that setup created, and you can certainly see how having it there in place already would be a tremendous draw to tech-oriented groups," she said.

A recently completed rewiring for high-speed access at the 1,206-room Fontainbleau Hilton Resort & Towers, seems to have had that exact effect at the hotel. The property, Miami's largest conference facility with 190,000 square feet of meeting space, recently installed T-1 high-speed connections in all of its meeting and exhibit spaces, in the hallways outside those facilities and in its Tower rooms, concierge-level accommodations that also have in-room fax machines.

"We knew that high-speed access was going to be important, but as soon as we got the system completed, we seemed to be having all sorts of new groups inquiring about meeting here because we have that access," Cole said. "There's an obvious savings for a group that might otherwise pay to have a high-speed system set up for their event--they can save that expense by simply going to a hotel like ours that already has such a system in place."

The convention center with the most extensive array of high-tech options in Florida is also the state's largest, the 1.1 million-sq.-ft. Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, which is set to double its square footage in 2003 and upgrade it high-speed access network as well. "Right now, you can pretty much say that as far as high-tech goes, if it's out there, we've got it," said Manny Rustia, who works for the convention center's tech department. "We've got high-speed access hookups all over the building, videoconferencing capabilities and a Web page, www.orlandoconvention.com, where you can keep up with events and schedules." For convention attendees with no laptops, there's a video monitor system, similar to what is found in airports, that displays events schedules all over the building.

High-speed Internet access jacks placed strategically around the exhibit area will be one of the key features of the Epcot World ShowPlace, a 40,000-sq.-ft. conference, meeting and trade show facility that is set to open at Disney World in Orlando in the summer of 2001. George Aguel, vice president of resort/park sales and service for Disney, said the theme park already has high-speed access in the meeting and exhibit halls of its major conference hotels, like the Coronado Springs Resort, BoardWalk Resort and Yacht and Beach Club.

"Because we have our own onsite telecommunications company, we have the capability for providing meeting groups with everything from cell phones to their own communications networks," he said.

A popular item with meeting groups, he said, is a cyber caf&eacute; that Disney can set up at virtually any location for a meeting group, so attendees can communicate with their offices back home or keep up with online accounts of a meeting or conference in progress.

The Disney hotels are among a growing list of Orlando-area hotels that either have installed or are installing high-speed Internet access. Others include the Celebration Hotel, the DoubleTree Castle Hotel and the Radisson Hotel Orlando, which also has a system called VirtualLINC, a satellite-based teleconferencing system.

New high-speed Internet systems in hotels around Florida include those at the Casa Monica Hotel in St. Augustine, the Naples Beach Hotel & Golf Club in southwest Florida and the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, with high-speed access in its newly opened Conference Center of the Americas. The Safety Harbor Resort & Spa in the Tampa Bay area currently is installing high-speed access, with the system set to be completed in 2001.

While wireless access like that installed at the Astor Hotel in Miami Beach is still rare, it's in the plans for other Florida hotels. "We are moving toward a system in which guests with a device like a Palm Pilot can actually skip the checkin process at the front desk and go straight to their rooms," said Denson of the Renaissance Orlando Resort at SeaWorld. "Our system will begin communicating with your Palm Pilot when you arrive. It will tell you what room to go to, open your door and when you get the room, the temperature will be pre-set to your personal preference."

And the basis for this futuristic system, Denson said, is the fiber-optic wiring the hotel already has in place.