The world model

At first glance, it’s a simple room control unit; clear lines, a set of keys for temperature control, a second one to adjust fan speed and a simple display in the middle. It has been installed a dozen times at the construction site for the new ‘Hyatt Place’ hotel in Hyderabad, India. So far, so good.

At second glance, however, the ‘Special Room Unit’, as its developers have called it, covers a whole cascade of complex questions. What level of comfort does a hotel guest in Hyderabad expect from their room? What sets them apart from a hotel guest in Yerevan, Armenia, or Shanghai, China, and more importantly: what unites them both? Is red an internationally understood symbol for heat? How about blue? And how can a room control device be designed so that all these doubts do not even arise? Questions such as these have been discussed intensively in recent months and years by professionals from Hager, Sauter and the Hyatt Hotel Group. As with ‘Hyatt Place’ the international hotel group wanted to establish another hotel brand under the Hyatt umbrella brand within which to open up new branches, in particular in growth markets and in quick succession. Here there is a shortage especially in the mid-market hotel segment. “In India there is a shortage of around 120,000 hotel rooms,” explains Suvankar Das, Home Automation Manager at Hager India. “The capacity for another 80,000 rooms will therefore be created by 2020 alone.”

Hager Group is likely to be involved in several of these new openings with its room operating panel. This is because the Global Hyatt Corporation in Chicago, Illinois, has defined global standard facilities as a guideline for local operators of its latest hotel category.

At Hager Group and Sauter, a global specialist in building automation and energy management, headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, two experts in electrical installation and building automation that can handle such a global project reliably were brought on board as the partners for room operation.

“Sauter shares a very similar philosophy to ours,” explains Ingo Jung, Hotel Business Development Manager at Hager Group. “While our Swiss colleagues bring enormous experience in building automation, we are contributing our proven design and electrical expertise.”

For the global Hyatt project the two partners were given a brief as strict as it was simple: maximum comfort for guests with minimal operating complexity. In addition, guests should be able to control their air conditioning without first having to activate the system with a hotel card.

Based on the pure and simple Berker K.1 switch programme, the project partners developed a room control element with internationally recognisable icons for indoor temperature and ventilation control, produced at a Hager factory. Room presence detectors ensure that the air conditioning is only active when a guest is in the room. At the same time, they can signal to room service that the guest is in residence and does not wish to be disturbed.

The universality of the solution is shown by, among other things, the fact that Hyatt Places in Yerevan, China and Dubai have already been equipped with them in addition to the new construction project in Hyderabad. The cooperation between the two project partners in turn proved so congenial that the simply beautiful Hyatt Place project will be followed by more all over the world as soon as possible.