With swimming pools, local beaches, a multitude of activities and a superb in-house entertainments team, Welcome Family Holiday Park in Dawlish Warren, Devon, UK, provides guests with an ideal environment for an active and fun packed holiday.
Central to that experience is the home-from-home accommodation provided on site, with a variety of caravans, bungalows, apartments and self catering lodges available for guests to choose from. These facilities have to be high-quality, comfortable and provide the guest with an experience that is familiar but different enough to feel special; including the technology.
Welcome Family investigated ways to modernise the park and, realising that coaxial television distribution was becoming a thing of the past, looked to IPTV, a logical step that would help them further leverage their investment in a modern and complete IP network, whilst also enabling them to brand every TV on site.
“When we initially looked at TV solutions for the park we were still in the age of coax and IPTV was very much the ‘dark horse’, seen as an emerging technology. However, we knew that IP would be the future, we could see it had already become instrumental in many other areas of technology delivery and so it would be a matter of time before the same would be said for TV,” commented Alistair Roberts, Director at Welcome Family.
He added; “It became apparent that IP was a much more elegant solution, with much less complexity in cabling terms and signal re-distribution. With an IP network in place for internet connectivity, telephony and several other services, it made sense to run our TV on it.”
After visiting a number of IPTV solution manufacturers Welcome Family decided they needed a standards based, reliable, flexible and future proof solution and chose Tripleplay’s IPTV system, TripleTV.
Alistair continued; “We investigated the options available to us, with a number of very credible solutions out there, and chose Tripleplay. A major factor in this choice was that Tripleplay was a software solutions provider, they did not manufacture hardware at all and so used industry standard technology that we knew we could get support for quickly and easily if and when needed.
“The Tripleplay solution offered safety and security, it is future proof, it uses tried, tested and trusted standards based technology and protocols and gave us the peace of mind we needed that, even if there was no Tripleplay any longer we would still have a solution that could be supported.”
Tripleplay’s HP server based solution also gave Welcome Family additional options that other solutions did not, allowing them to implement a digital signage solution to help promote and advertise services to guests and ‘window shoppers’.
“We have five digital signage screens in communal and reception areas around site showing a mixture of pre and post sales content. It is not a hugely complex digital signage estate but the Tripleplay solution gave us the ability to implement very easily and cost effectively.
“Rather than assess digital signage for the value it adds in additional revenue, we actually see it more as a statement of our intent to provide our guests with the most modern and up-to-the-minute facilities; this is something we take great pleasure in doing in everything we provide.”
In all, Welcome Family Holiday Park now has around 200 residential units with a Tripleplay IPTV solution, having installed around 100 in the initial roll out in 2010, and is looking to increase this organically in the coming years.
The main focus for Alistair and his team is that they continue to give the guests what they want, including a good quality TV service.
“We’ve always looked at our situation from the basic standpoint that we find out what the customer wants, and then we give it to them. We believe, with the Tripleplay solution, that we are doing just that,” continued Alistair.
“Our visitors are different to the type of guest a hotel will have. They are not time precious, they have a lot of time for leisure, they are in no great rush; therefore, the TV is something familiar to unwind with and fill a little time once the children have been put to bed rather than a main source of entertainment.”
Whilst the solution is not necessarily vital to the park’s entertainment provision, Welcome Family appreciate the value of solution up-time and how important TV can be to guests, even if just as a passive medium; “One of the things that has impressed us with the Tripleplay solution is that it is incredibly reliable. We have had very few issues with the system since its implementation and certainly nothing that couldn’t be resolved quickly. If our TVs were down for even a few hours our guests would let us know, so having the peace of mind that our solution is stable and that we can get support when we need it is fantastic.”
Alistair summarised; “We are looking to extend the solution further in the coming years adding a backup server for extra resilience and extra TV channels, including Sky Sports and Movies, and it is great to know that the solution we chose from Tripleplay many years ago will allow us to do this very simply and very quickly.”
