numa signs a managed services agreement with Wifirst to support their digitalisation across Europe 

Similar to Wifirst’s business model, innovators in the digital hospitality sector, numa group provides short and mid-term accommodation for travellers across European capitals offering their guests a truly authentic home away from home experience.

// PROPTECH FOR YOUR HOSPITALITY BUSINESS

Digitalising hospitality across Europe

With a motto of simplicity and delight, numa is an apart-hotel chain like no other. They are building in new ways, bringing technology and taste to some of the world's greatest cities. Focusing mainly on large European cities to date, they offer their customers world-class experience, with full stack software and 80% digitalisation of the internal processes of the business. The customer experience is 100% digital with self check-in check-out and app based communication. Thanks to this, they have significantly reduced their operating costs and have been able to be more agile and efficient, allowing them to really focus on client satisfaction.

Challenges of a highly digital business model

With numa’s high digitalisation of internal processes for their business (80%) and guests (100%), many different technologies have to play a part. However, the installation of their network was such that they had many different technologies but with multiple different vendors, each with their own layer on the infrastructure. Unfortunately, not having a unified network meant having to mitigate a complex scenario with the multiple vendors whenever there were issues with one of the digital solutions. This was also a challenge for their hyper-scalability plan across Europe as they worked with different WiFi partners in the different locations.

Wifirst's “Network as a Service” model provides comprehensive WAN, LAN and WiFi solutions that support the rapid expansion of brands like numa across Europe. By entrusting Wifirst at a European scale, numa’s Information Systems Department has thus chosen an experienced supplier capable of offering a one-stop-shop service with multi-technology and multi-operator solutions. By providing best-in class managed WiFi, with full cabling and hardware provision anywhere in Europe, numa saw in Wifirst a trustworthy partner who could support them with projects across European cities, always offering the same quality of service and support, no matter the location. 

Indeed, the Wifirst network presents unparalleled capabilities paired with an unrivalled availability rate thanks to peering agreements held with numerous significant operators. numa now enjoys fully unified infrastructures and a smoother network configuration that includes third party IPTV, Chromecast, CCTV and door lock technologies across the Wifirst equipped properties, allowing numa operations staff to focus only on customer experience and their brand. 

// A PERMANENT & LONG-TERM SUPPORT

A valuable expertise to deliver rapid deployments on a European scope

Working with a service provider who specialises in large scale deployments of WiFi infrastructures for businesses can be a great benefit for many business owners looking to digitalise at large scale. Wifirst engineering and project delivery teams were able to meet the challenging short lead time (2-3 months) for numa’s latest properties across Europe.

The Wifirst deployment factory was in full force, working alongside building managers in multiple languages during the complex work of refurbishment, delivering the project with great success. Wifirst was able to plan, implement and deliver (think, build, run) WiFi solutions for all new numa properties in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Norway, Italy and Portugal; Denmark and UK over the past year. Looking into the future, deployments in Spain, France and the Netherlands are not far from scope. 

What does the future hold for this partnership?

This European deployment project is a testament to our capability to deliver scalability and consistency of our solutions. Thanks to the MSA between numa and Wifirst, this is only the beginning of our partnership, with more sites on the pipeline and more innovation on the horizon. This was all made possible thanks to Wifirst flexible management model, showing our commitment to work within the clients requirements, whether they be budgetary or technical!