Guldsmeden Hotel

Background

Guldsmeden is a fast-growing chain of boutique hotels with an emphasis on luxurious simplicity, what it calls “happy hostmanship”, an unpretentious atmosphere, and uncompromising sustainability. Today the group, founded in 1999, has six hotels in Denmark, one each in Norway, Iceland and Germany, a luxury villa in the south of France, and a luxury resort in Bali. The company has more hotels in the pipeline, so when our reseller partner Hospitality Partner approached Guldsmeden with a proposal to supply Philips Android™-based TV solutions to the company, Guldsmeden was interested. Hospitality Partner, which is based in Denmark, supplies services and products for hotels and the healthcare industry across the Nordic region: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland. Like all our partners, it believes in offering added value, and it aims to become its clients’ preferred choice for innovative and cost-efficient solutions

Challenge

Hospitality Partner’s idea was to support Guldsmeden in both its expansion ambitions and in the normal refurbishment cycle for its existing properties. It would be an ongoing relationship based on supplying advanced Philips TVs, excellent content, and maintaining an ongoing, value-adding relationship. The concept hit the right note for Guldsmeden. The company was seeking a supplier that would do more than “move boxes” – i.e., a partner that would provide ongoing service and support, including managing the network, creating content and potentially adding functionality in the future. For Guldsmeden, the Hospitality Partner/Philips combination ticked all the right boxes

Solution

Hospitality Partner suggested employing Android™-based Philips MediaSuite TVs featuring our CMND platform. With CMND, Hospitality Partners could create content to promote each hotel’s facilities – dining, spas, conference rooms – and provide a marketing channel to cross-promote the other hotels in the group. Our CMND platform comprises four ‘modules’: CMND & Deploy (easy rollout and hardware management); CMND & Create (easily create, manage and update great-looking content); CMND & Control (for managing settings network-wide); and CMND & Check-in (PMS services). Guldsmeden and Hospitality Partner made full use of the first three options, and Guldsmeden is further keen to add CMND & Check-in PMS services soon

Benefits

Thanks to the Philips CMND platform concept, Hospitality Partner was able to simplify and accelerate deployment and create and manage content that would engage and inform Guldsmeden’s guests. At the time of writing, Hospitality Partner and Philips had completed three projects for Guldsmeden: Manon Les Suites and Axel Hotel Guldsmeden, both in Copenhagen, and Lulu Guldsmeden, in Berlin. Together, these involved installing some 500 TVs, plus creating content. Based on the smooth success of the first project we did together, Guldsmeden awarded Hospitality Partner a chain-wide agreement for three years. Guldsmeden, even though they originally had another TV manufacturer in mind, are delighted by the sleek design of the Philips TVs and the possibilities offered by the Philips CMND-driven information channel. And the organisation is looking forward to implementing a PMS solution in the near-future, too. For Guldsmeden, it’s about more than just putting a TV in each room; it’s about having partners who will go the extra mile and support them around the world, and that’s true of both Hospitality Partner and us