With HikCentral, Catalonia Hotels has unified its security infrastructure and gained operational autonomy.
Catalonia Hotels, a Spanish hotel chain with properties across Europe and the Caribbean, was facing a complex management challenge: each of its hotels operated with a different security system, from different manufacturers and with no integration between them.
The lack of a centralized overview made it impossible to monitor the status of hotel properties in real time and forced the IT team to manage incidents reactively and manually. The solution came from Hikvision and its HikCentral cloud platform, which has radically transformed the security operations of the entire hotel chain.
A mosaic of systems impossible to manage
According to Catalonia Hotels’ own IT team, the initial situation was a completely heterogeneous model. The complexity stemmed from the fact that each hotel had chosen its own manufacturer at the time, creating a fully fragmented infrastructure with no possibility of cross-site supervision and with the operational burden falling entirely on local teams.
We didn’t have a cross-functional overview from the IT and security department. Achieving a centralized vision was impossible when each hotel had a different security provider and each property managed its own recording operations, explains Ricardo Carrillo, IT Manager at Catalonia Hotels.
The impact on daily operations was immediate and constant. Whenever authorities requested access to security recordings, the hotel manager had to physically go to the communications rack to retrieve the footage. There was no remote access, no shared platform and no coordinated response capability from headquarters. Faced with this situation, Hikvision’s objective was clear: move away from a reactive model and build a proactive one, with a single provider, worldwide coverage and a centralized international overview.
HikCentral: a unified link for the entire chain
The answer came with HikCentral, Hikvision’s cloud platform designed to integrate all of an organization’s security elements into a single environment: video capture, recording, videowall management, access control and user profile administration.
The implementation of the platform at Catalonia Hotels first had to address the extreme heterogeneity of systems and manufacturers at each property in order to provide the IT department with a centralized overview and achieve more efficient support operations with delegation capabilities. In this way, Hikvision’s team responded to the need to guarantee consistent coverage across properties located throughout Europe and the Caribbean.
HikCentral is the link connecting all the elements that make up the project. Ultimately, it provides a global and transversal deployment of the solution in which versatility is key, because it allows the system to adapt to any type of environment, anywhere in the world, at any time, says Toni Álvarez, Vertical Presales at Hikvision.
The company’s extensive experience in corporate cloud deployments for both public and private organizations was crucial in guaranteeing the project’s stability, scalability and cost control.
Results: efficiency, autonomy and a future-ready vision
Since its implementation, HikCentral has transformed Catalonia Hotels’ security operations in multiple ways. Hotel managers can now remotely access recordings and share them with authorities without having to travel to the property. Level 1 support tasks have been delegated to the hotels themselves, freeing up the central IT team. The platform has also enabled new capabilities, including automatic occupancy alerts at reception and frictionless access for VIP guests through license plate recognition systems.
On the technical side, one of the most notable elements was the adoption of the 9:16 capture format, specifically designed for corridor environments. This model allows the camera’s full potential to focus on the useful area, eliminating walls and ceilings from the frame while optimizing both storage and the quality of subsequent forensic analytics.
The implementation of HikCentral allows us to look toward the future. Now, for the first time, we are able to manage the chain’s demands from a single point, seamlessly, concludes Ricardo Carrillo, IT Manager at Catalonia Hotels.
