The Student Hotel is a hospitality concept owned and operated by City Living, a Dutch company. Students and globetrotting tourists stay alongside each other in four city locations in the Netherlands and Belgium.
A previous CCTV system lacked the image quality to appropriately monitor and protect the premises. After a formal review, the hotel modernised the surveillance systems at its Rotterdam and The Hague sites by installing Full HD resolution Canon network security cameras for monitoring of the premises for security purposes. With a high turnover of residents, the hotel mixes guests staying for a few days with those staying for a short stay (three weeks or more) or an academic term. The Student Hotel needs to ensure that any incidents are quickly dealt with and people held accountable, whatever their length of stay. As a result, improving the image quality was a concern and motivation for the upgrade.
At the Rotterdam and The Hague, the focus was on ensuring that corridors, public spaces and entrances to the hotels were monitored effectively using cameras that produced a high enough quality of image. The Rotterdam Student Hotel is a 484-resident property that has a boutique, modern style, in the Kralingen district ; while The Hague Student Hotel has 309 rooms in what was once a derelict bazaar. Both properties place a high value on their unique design so it was important that the cameras fitted in with the look and feel of the buildings.
Canon’s VB-S800D compact design blended into the open plenum ceiling layout. Designed for indoor use, the VB-S800D enables the monitoring of specific areas or items. To protect its high traffic corridors and public spaces, the Student Hotel placed cameras in multiple locations. The cameras’ analytics sense movement, abandoned and removed objects, camera tampering and changing volume or light, to give analytics that are reset within 20 seconds of detecting a change in the environment – something vital for the busy premises. Smart Shade Control (SSC) functions enabled staff to monitor areas, regardless of the lighting.
The Student Hotel has been impressed by the quality and flexibility of the network cameras. The devices benefit from Canon’s 70 years’ experience as a lens manufacturer, and as a result, the clarity of the images is superior to the previous system the hotel says. City Living is planning to use Canon’s network security cameras throughout its properties. City Living is building ten to 15 Student Hotels across Europe over the coming year, taking the total to 20.
Thanks to the project to date and the collaboration between Canon, CNI Europe BV and installers Bectro Installatietechniek BV, City Living is also considering using other Canon products towards conferencing and technology suites in the properties.
Jan-Pieter Muis, Asset Manager at the Student Hotel was looking to overhaul the system, without installing features that were unnecessary for the this type of property.
He says: “Our hotels are developed by a team of enthusiastic and dedicated professionals and we’re constantly busy improving the experience our guests receive. We needed a solution which was easy to operate and effective, while offering brilliant quality images and monitoring in a range of environments and lighting conditions across the hotels.”
The installer, Bectro Installatietechniek BV, worked with the hotel to find a solution that the team was comfortable with. The owners were already familiar with Milestone’s video management software (VMS) and so were interested to understand more about working with Canon and Milestone together. Further to consultation from City Living’s distributor CNI Europe BV, fixed minidome Canon VB-S800D cameras with Milestone VMS XProtect Express software were selected for both sites. Some 23 cameras were installed at Rotterdam, and 25 VB-S800D cameras at The Hague. At The Hague, five VB-H710F cameras were also fitted for outdoor monitoring.
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