Wireless connectivity has trumped every other amenity when it comes to what hotel patrons desire most, according to the latest from Forrester Research.

A whopping 94% of business travelers claimed that well-performing Wi-Fi was essential to their stay in the report, but it’s not just an opinion held by workaholics.

As the modern enterprise becomes more distributed, travelers of all stripes - whether on the road for business or pleasure - require constant connectivity. It allows workers to be “always on,” whether that means casually checking work email on vacation or collaborating with teams via messaging apps while staffing a remote conference.

But performant Wi-Fi also allows guests to share vacation photos over social media, for instance, or take advantage of streaming apps when they don’t have “the job” top-of-mind during a trip. International travelers may even opt for little-to-no coverage plan from their wireless carrier in favor of Wi-Fi hopping along their trips.

Delivering Wi-Fi access is especially important, as 64% of leisure travelers told Forrester that they are not loyal to a particular hotel brand. With a staggering 89% of guests “deciding where to lodge based on free reliable Wi-Fi,” according to the 2018 Lodging Technology Study, it turns out connectivity is key to brands staying competitive, too.

Business guests are just one piece of the puzzle

It’s not just about delivering Wi-Fi technology to guests: Connectivity also plays a major role in driving the success of major brands throughout the hospitality industry from an operational perspective.

As has been the case in other industries, hotel brands today connect their various branch or franchise locations via a corporate wide area network (WAN) that supports many of the critical applications hoteliers need to both keep guests happy and the lights on.

For instance, guests expect a simple and smooth check-in process akin to what they’re increasingly experiencing with point-of-sale systems at retailers. Hotels can avoid bottlenecks at checkout by arming check-in staff with Wi-Fi-enabled devices that allow employees to service staff from different parts of the property.

Connectivity is also essential to guests who need their lodging to double as a remote office. The hotel’s Wi-Fi needs to be able to handle an array of personal and business devices that customers bring along, as well as share enough bandwidth to support large volumes of data or real-time communication apps.

At the end of the day, however, hotel networks need to support a seemingly countless number of business and pleasure apps that all place unique demands on network capacity that IT needs to support.

Regaining visibility during digital transformation, cloud migration

The challenges with juggling all of this connectivity is similar in the hospitality space to what IT faces in other industries. As connectivity becomes increasingly pivotal to business, hotel brands are exploring a similar “digital transformation” model that enterprises in other fields are undergoing.

IT teams are retiring their data-center-centric network architectures in favor of connecting through cloud environments and direct internet access (DIA). In many cases, global hotel brands will need to leverage an array of cloud vendors and ISPs to support and deliver traffic across the network.

The benefit here is that IT doesn’t need to support or own a physical infrastructure that exhausts resources and requires a local presence at every branch office.

Some of the drawbacks, however, might include a lack of visibility into what’s going on locally at each remote location. While the old network architecture that was based around a data center and MPLS connections allowed IT to have insight into the entire delivery path of the apps they need most, IT teams lose that visibility when they rely on cloud and DIA exclusively.

If one branch location is experiencing poor latency compared to other locations, IT will need a monitoring solution that delivers visibility along each network path to pinpoint the actual cause of the issue and to resolve it.

This is true for ensuring that Wi-Fi is getting delivered with minimal delay at each of the brand’s branch locations, too. Rather than supporting a local IT team at each hotel in a brand’s portfolio, a comprehensive network performance monitoring solution should be able to see past local firewalls and into the LAN to identify potential connectivity issues that are isolated to one location.

Digging deeper, an effective network performance monitoring solution should be able to monitor for the performance of all apps in use over a given network. This means that IT will need not just visibility into the business-critical applications used by staff, but also the performance of guests’ personal apps using a specific location’s Wi-Fi.

A guest may be pleased by a speedy check-in, for instance, but if their grumpy child can’t stream from their tablet once they’ve settled into their room, guest satisfaction suffers in kind.

Hotel business changes reflect a cultural shift

Ensuring connectivity is especially critical as the model for many hotel businesses change with the new lifestyle of the modern traveler. Because 85% of travelers bring some kind of Wi-Fi-enabled device with them to their lodging, delivering on connectivity has become a key metric that individual branch locations are graded on.

At the end of the day, IT teams need a network performance monitoring solution that breaks down the barriers to visibility across the network where issues hindering performance could be hiding.