Life without a pulse

November should have been the month hoteliers learnt how they were going to replace the BT service that underpins the third largest source of income in most hotels.

It should have been the month BT released plans for an alternative to the pulse metering system hoteliers use to keep track of - and charge for - guests' outgoing telephone calls.

It should have been the month that BT came up with a viable and cost-free solution to the chaos it will cause when it unilaterally abandons pulse metering at the end of 2001. But it hasn't turned out that way. Instead, anyone thinking of buying a call-logging system, upgrading their existing system or linking call logging to their property-management system (PMS) is faced with an agonising decision over what to install.

For the uninitiated - or for anyone who was thinking of putting their hand in their pocket for a new call-metering system - pulse metering is the (almost) inaudible pulse BT puts down the phone line each time a call tots up another BT charging unit. Callers occasionally hear the pulses, but hotel call-logging equipment never misses them, doggedly counting each one and presenting each guest's final tally for conversion to hoteliers' own telephone charging rates.

But pulse metering became obsolete overnight in June 1995, when, in the face of competition from Mercury, BT introduced per-second billing. For BT the change was a simple commercial decision, but for hoteliers its implications were catastrophic, rendering their installed base of logging equipment obsolete overnight and leaving them to pick up the bill.

In the face of criticism from customers, BT has postponed pulse metering's switch-off date from the end of 1998, and promised to come up with an alternative system this November. Only there isn't one.

"We don't need to make any announcement," says BT pulse metering spokesman Eric Barr. "The plan is we'll stop providing it as a new service for new customers from the end of 1998 and we'll stop sending pulses down the line from the end of 2001."

What has made BT willing to risk going a second round with its long-suffering customers is the sheer quantity of cost-effective - and better - low-priced call-logging equipment now appearing on the market.

One who has invested in such a system is Catriona Miller, who installed a Goldstar GDK system in the 14-bedroom Cromwell House hotel she runs in Lulworth Cove, Dorset.

"It's given us the opportunity to provide guests with the kind of telecommunications facilities they would normally expect in a large hotel," says Miller, who installed the system last March. "Each guest is logged in to their phone as they check in, and the phone is locked so no one can use it when they check out," she says. "It does a complete print-out of the guest's bill and you can add the bar tariff to it or even their hotel bill."

The system allows reception staff to block the phone if children are staying in the room and to illuminate a light on the phone to alert guests to messages - all through a PC that logs everything that happens on the system.

But what really won Miller over to the system was that it allows her to divert incoming night-time calls to any of the hotel extensions or its outlying cottages - wherever the duty officer is staying. The PC answers incoming calls with voice-mail that allows callers to tap in a room number if they want direct connection to a guest.

"The great joy of it was that we didn't have to put in any extra BT lines," Miller says. "But you do need at least two lines, one for incoming and one for outgoing." That ability to offer direct dialling in is a feature most hoteliers still think only expensive private branch exchange (PBX) systems can offer - and then only if they install ISDN lines.

But, according to David Brown, south west regional manager for Horsham-based telecoms consultancy ABS, hoteliers can have all of this installed over their existing analogue BT lines for only £200 per quarter.

That's the price for which Brown says installation companies can put a Goldstar GDK system into a 20-bedroom hotel - as ABS's West Country subsidiary BTC did for Miller. At £10 per quarter per room, that's an economic way of simply providing each guest with a telephone and making sure you can log calls and charge them to customers' bills.

Where once hoteliers would have had to spend tens of thousands on a PBX and ISDN lines, keyphone systems like Miller's bring the price of those features down to little more than BT's monthly rental charges.

Keyphone systems use number codes to let hotel management instruct the system what to do, leaving the PC software to take care of any digital complexities. And the flexibility of PCs now allows them to deliver call-logging information to most PMS software.

Roger Ansin, managing director of Symantics, brought his New Zealand-based company over here when he heard that BT was dropping pulse metering. He says hoteliers who used pulse metering were forced to stick with BT because it was the only one that offered the service.

And while hoteliers may be tempted to stick with existing pulse meter-driven call loggers by spending £2,400 on a pulse simulator box, he says: "It's a Band-Aid solution. In a few years everyone will have forgotten pulse metering existed." Instead, he recommends buying software like the Frontdesk system that includes call profit-margin analysis facilities and allows hoteliers to adjust call charges and quickly recoup the £1,500 to £1,700 cost of buying the system.

"You'd have to add the cost of the PC and the printer," he says, "but for that hoteliers get a PMS and call logging taken care of, plus a range of about 25 management reports." Ansin admits that the Frontdesk PMS is "low-end" in terms of cost but says small hoteliers don't want high-end PMS. To prove it, he says, he's installed the system in 50 hotels since coming to the UK - 16 of them in the past month. One of them is the 80-bedroom King Charles hotel in Gillingham, Kent, where proprietor Stephen Degiorgio wanted power and ease of use.

"It reports on the profitability of the calls," he says. "It's easy to see when it's in front of you, and you can play with the charging at different times and to different areas to adjust your profits and free calls." He's already adjusted his charging rates to pull in more profit, and says the system paid for its total costs within a year, though unpriceable features such as its adaptability and ease of use come high on his list of benefits now that he's watched staff using it. "We're now putting it into our sister hotel - the Inn on the Lake in Gravesend," he says.

This is the kind of system that established, upmarket operators such as Tiger and TMS have been installing in huge hotel chains for years, but at a price that small and medium hoteliers can afford.

And better yet, these solutions bring more versatility to managing call logging than you'd ever have thought possible. Time to pick up that phone…