What gets in the way
- The after-hours phone is the front desk. For accommodation and function bookings, a misrouted after-hours call is often a lost booking, and nobody notices until a guest mentions it.
- Cameras that have to work on the night. Footage only helps if the camera was recording and someone knows how to pull it, and licensed venues can have legal CCTV requirements on top.
- Guests on your network. Guest wi-fi, tills, booking systems and office PCs can end up on one network, which puts a stranger’s device next to your payments.
- More than one venue. A second venue arrives with its own handsets, numbers and email, and running two of everything doubles the work and the faults.
How we help
- Business Telephony: One hosted phone system across your venues, with menus, ring groups, after-hours voicemail and call flows built around how bookings actually come in.
- Physical Security: Cameras and door access designed and managed with your IT, on their own network segment, with retention set to what your licence and insurer require.
- Network & Connectivity: Guest wi-fi segmented away from the tills, booking system, cameras and office PCs, behind monitored firewalls and access points.
- Bastion Managed Services: A weekday service desk with after-hours phone support at the after-hours rate, so a fault on a Saturday night has somewhere to go.
- Security Awareness: Short training so bar, reception and office staff know which held emails are routine and which need a phone call before anyone pays.
Obligations worth knowing
- Licensed venues in the Brisbane City Council area authorised to trade past 1am must operate CCTV, as must other Queensland venues where it’s a licence condition, with equipment certified every 6 months and recordings kept at least 28 days. Source
- Fair Work requires employee records, including pay and hours for casual staff, to be kept for 7 years in a form that’s readily accessible to a Fair Work Inspector. Source
Phones built around how bookings come in
For clubs and accommodation, the after-hours menu is the front desk for half the day. When a community club took on a second venue, we started by collecting how calls worked there and mapped a call flow for the club to agree: a menu for the bar and bistro, function bookings, the bowls lawn and the office, voicemail overnight, and the bar’s desk phone and a cordless ringing together. On the day we moved the phones across, with numbers forwarded to temporary ones while the port went through. Our business telephony runs on a network we manage, so there’s one call to make when something’s wrong.
Cameras you can rely on
At an inner-Brisbane accommodation business, we replaced five cameras in the positions they already covered, set up recording, checked each angle and showed staff how to use the new system. Physical security is designed and managed as part of your IT, so camera hardware sits on its own network segment and its firmware and passwords get the same attention as everything else.
Licensed venues have rules of their own. Under Queensland’s CCTV requirements for licensed venues, venues in the Brisbane City Council area authorised to trade past 1am must operate CCTV, equipment must be certified every six months and ordinary recordings kept at least 28 days. Retention and checks are worth setting on purpose rather than leaving at whatever the installer chose.
Guest wi-fi and the back office
Guests expect wi-fi, and that’s fine. What matters is that the network they join has no path to the tills, the booking system, the cameras or the office PCs. Network management keeps them apart and monitors the firewall between. A year of work for a club and an accommodation business covers what else came up, from carpark cable runs to do-not-disturb settings that didn’t forward calls.
Work we’ve done in this sector
- IT for clubs and accommodation: phones, cameras and guest wi-fi
- Bringing a club’s second venue onto one phone system
- Upgrading a motel’s cameras in the spots they already covered