Helsinki’s Scandic Hotel offers one-click meetings with ClickShare Conference

Scandic is the largest Nordic hotel operator with a network of about 280 hotels with 58,000 rooms in operation and under development in six countries.

 

Approximately 70 percent of the company’s revenue comes from business travel and conferences, which means that conference rooms are an essential part of Scandic’s services. Scandic has meeting venues for two to 2,000 people, suited for face-to-face and online meetings. 

The company is also adapting its services to the new reality of hybrid work and hybrid meeting. Scandic is therefore continuously investing in a better meeting experience for its business customers. One example is Scandic Simonkenttä, at the heart of the Helsinki city center. The hotel recently installed Barco’s ClickShare Conference wireless conferencing solution in its meeting rooms with the intention to meet an increasing need for user-friendly video conferencing equipment. 

 

 

“Whether our users want to meet face to face, online or something in between, we want to offer them the best meeting experience,” says Kirsi Ilmasti, Sales Director Meetings & Events at Scandic. “With the increased need for online and hybrid meetings, we want to be sure that meeting participants who join digitally can have the best viewing and audio experience. Barco’s ClickShare Conference enables us to do that.” 

Expectations are high with today’s business customers. They want meeting solutions that enable them to interact with everyone in the meeting, but also that are extremely easy to use. The typical Scandic conference room user does not have wide IT expertise, so video meetings should be easy to set up. At the same time, IT interventions by Scandic staff are costly, and therefore the hotel company wants to limit those visits to an absolute minimum. 

 

 

“In the past, we needed to provide for many different cables and connectors for different devices,” says Kirsi Ilmasti. “Today, our meeting room users can bring their own laptop to the meeting and wirelessly connect to the meeting room display, camera and speakers. This is much easier.” 

Also connecting different sources to one meeting device used to be difficult, according to Kirsi Ilmasti. Now all it takes is one ClickShare unit. “The most important difference with our previous meeting room equipment is the ease of use. One click is enough for users to join the meeting. Whether they are using Zoom, MS Teams or WebEx, ClickShare Conference makes it very straightforward.” 

Easier for the user also means easier for Scandic Simonkenttä hotel. Thanks to the addition of ClickShare Conference, the hotel management expects to see less costly intervention requests from meeting room users. “For now, we are providing written user instructions for conference room users who want to use the ClickShare unit. Because this technology is so straightforward, people do not need personal assistance from us,” says Kirsi Ilmasti.