JW Marriott Marquis Dubai is the twin-tower Marriott property on Sheikh Zayed Road at Business Bay, one of the tallest hotels in the world and one of the largest conference and banqueting venues in the city. Alongside the guest rooms it runs a substantial food and beverage operation and a meetings and events business that fills its own floors.
JW Marriott Marquis Dubai runs Live for hotel digital signage.
A hotel this size is really three businesses sharing a lobby
That is what makes hospitality signage harder than it looks, and it is why a large property tends to end up with a lot of screens.
The rooms business wants arrivals to find their way, and wants the public spaces to feel like the brand rather than like an airport. The screens here are wayfinding, welcome and brand content, and they change slowly.
The food and beverage business runs a dozen outlets with their own opening hours, menus, offers and events. Those screens change daily, and often several times a day as a venue moves from lunch to evening service.
The meetings and events business is the one that breaks generic signage software. Every meeting room and pre-function area needs the right session name, the right client, the right time and the right direction, and it all changes several times a day, every day, with the schedule set by a completely different team from the one that owns the brand content downstairs.
One CMS, three update rhythms, three sets of content owners, and one building.
What that demands from the CMS
Dayparting that is genuinely per-screen. A restaurant screen switching from breakfast to lunch and a pre-function screen switching between two conferences are the same mechanism, running on different clocks in the same estate.
Scoped access, so the right team owns the right screens. F&B should be able to change a menu board without being able to change the lobby, and the events team should own the meeting floors. Scoped user access is what makes that possible without a single bottleneck operator.
Screens that hold their content. A guest-facing display that goes black is visible to every person walking past it. The Live players cache their schedule and play from local storage rather than streaming, so a network interruption is something the technical team sees before the guests do.
One system across mixed hardware. A property built out over years rarely has one make of screen. Live runs on Windows, Android, Linux, LG webOS, Samsung Tizen and BrightSign from the same CMS, so a mixed estate does not become several signage systems that happen to be in the same building.
Specifying signage for a hotel
Count the screens by owner rather than by floor. The events team, the food and beverage team and whoever owns the brand look after different screens on different clocks, and a system that cannot give each of them their own scope ends up with one bottleneck operator doing everything, which is where hotel signage usually goes quiet.
If you are specifying for a hotel or a conference venue, ask sales for a reference call and put the question to someone already running one.