Seventeen plain-English questions covering the ground a brand assessment, a PCI review and an unhappy guest all care about — guest Wi-Fi, your PMS, payments, legacy interfaces and who answers at 2am. See your grade instantly, then get a written breakdown of every answer and what to do about it.
1. Is your guest Wi-Fi kept completely separate from the network that runs your PMS, payment terminals and back office?
2. When were your wireless access points last replaced, and does Wi-Fi reach every guest room reliably?
3. If your main internet circuit went down at 6pm on a Friday, would anything take over automatically?
4. Is your property management system cloud-hosted — and if there is a server on site, is its operating system still supported by Microsoft?
5. Do any of your systems still talk to each other over serial cables — the old nine-pin COM ports on the back of a PC, or a small converter box in the network closet? Common with door locks, call accounting, energy management, minibars and older phone systems.
6. How do your guest room locks get their keys — and does the lock system talk to the PMS reliably?
7. Can someone dial 911 from a guest room phone without pressing 9 first — and does the call tell the dispatcher which room it came from?
8. Do card numbers ever end up written on paper, typed into PMS notes, or sent by email — for a phone reservation or a group booking, for example?
9. Has someone completed your annual PCI self-assessment questionnaire, and do you know which version applies to your property?
10. Do you know what your brand's current IT and network standard requires — and when were you last assessed against it?
11. Does every person at the front desk sign in to the PMS as themselves — and how quickly is access removed when someone leaves?
12. Does signing in to hotel email or your management systems need a second step as well as a password — like a code on a phone?
13. Do you know every outside company that can dial into your systems — PMS, POS, locks, cameras, phones, energy management — and does anyone review that access?
14. If your back-office server or PMS data were lost tonight, could you get it back — and has anyone actually tested that?
15. Is your camera recorder kept up to date, and does it hold footage for as long as your brand or insurer requires?
16. It is 2am, the PMS is down and the night auditor cannot check anyone in. Who do they call, and how fast does someone answer?
17. If we opened your network closet today, would we find labelled cabling, a working battery backup and somewhere cool enough for the equipment?
Skip the questions — call us or request a site visit and we'll go through it together, closet included.