First and foremost, unique billing requirements is one of the most prevalent characteristic necessary in a hospitality PBX system. Integrating with an existing billing system is usually the most common solution for satisfying these requirements but what if the customer additionally needs a complete billing solution? I’ve found that a smaller hotel won’t mind simply breaking down the necessary information from the stock excel sheets that Asterisk spits out with its CDR details. But for a larger hotel that needs a complete solution there are open source alternatives like A2Billing (not the best piece of software we’ve worked with, be careful) which is really designed for the telecom industry but can be tweaked for hospitality billing. Other OS options include AstBill and StarShop. I’d love to hear from the community what your experience with either of these two billing applications has been.

Features are another important element to a hospitality IP PBX but we all know Asterisk can satisfy almost any feature requirement. What I’m more interested in are the capabilities Asterisk can offer that may not be at the tip of your tongue. Hotels can no longer justify the expense of an IP PBX by the revenue stream generated by customers placing calls since almost everyone uses their cell phones these days. What should not be underestimated is the value-add an effective IP PBX system can have on a guests experience. Everyone still prefers to speak with a real person when at all possible, but things like scheduling a wake-up call, checking the weather, getting the hotel address, and seeing whether the pool room is open for a late night hot tub can all be automated through room phones. The key is making these features easy to access by using soft keys. You could even program the system to display the customers name while they’re checked in… imagine walking into your room and the phone is scrolling “Welcome to the Marriott Marquis Mr. & Mrs. Jones”. I’d give my hotel major points for that!

The next and last component of a hospitality PBX that I’d like to discuss are the phones. Phones are what every patron sees sitting on their bed-side table and as higher-end hotels continue deploying new electronic devices in their rooms, phones should not be overlooked (but I think quite often they are). Sure most people won’t use their phone to make personal calls but a room phone should display relevant information on its screen. By using a phone with a large and sexy color display, each guest room phone can serve up information like the weather, scrolling stock quotes, and even advertising. Advertising is an excellent way to justify the additional expense of purchasing a color phone. Advertising this way can be an excellent revenue stream.

Teledex, a manufacturer of phones specifically for the hospitality industry, released last year a line of IP/SIP phones. Although we’ve never used these phones with Asterisk, Teledex claims that they work well with Asterisk. Now I don’t know how Teledex has avoided the Apple Inc. hammer but their IP phones are named the iPhone series. Perhaps the best feature on these phones is that they use a touch-screen color display. Watch the Teledex iPhone demo and you’ll get an idea of how awesome a properly configured IP PBX system can be a huge value-add for guests. The color Cisco 7970 is another nice color phone which is used by the hospitality industry and I’m hoping that the new Polycom IP670 with its color screen will also be a great guest room phone.

You don’t hear much about Asterisk being used by large hotel chains but hopefully this changes and I know we’ve been seeing many more opportunities in this industry over last year. In addition to what’s already been discussed here, what other features and functionality has this community seen or worked on for the hospitality industry?

I just wanted to plant some ideas here but also want to discuss fring™which at the moment looks like the best mVoIP company out there. fring™ is a mobile internet service & community that enables you to access & interact with your social networks on-the-go, make free calls and live chat with all your fring, Skype®, MSN® Messenger, Google Talk™, ICQ, SIP, Twitter, Yahoo!™ and AIM®* friends using your handset’s internet connection rather than costly cellular airtime minutes.

There are other mVoIP companies like jajah but fring doesn’t charge anything for their service. As far as I’m concerned, my favorite thing about fring is that I can call my dad in Australia using the skype client from my mobile phone and it doesn’t cost me a penny!

What I really want to see is integration with fring’s SIP client and Asterisk. This would be a huge feature add for a large company using an Asterisk based IP PBX. I just sold myself. Maybe we’ll make this part of our Asterisk based IP PBX solutions…. let me get some engineers working on this pronto!