The Oldest System Sets the Pace

Somewhere on the property there is a communications system that has worked for 15 years. It might be in a basement room, or on a rack behind the business center, or in a cabinet two decks below the waterline. Wherever it is, it answers calls, rings rooms, and survives power blips. The technician who understood it retired in 2021.

Replacement parts come from resellers who found them in other properties' basements or ships since gone to scrap. The manufacturer announced end of support two renewals ago, and the annual maintenance quote has risen every year since, because the vendor prices scarce skills the way anyone prices scarce things.

By every visible measure, the system is fine. It has earned the operational trust that only long service builds, and at a multi-property group, dozens of variations of this, from different vendors and different decades, are running right now across the estate or fleet. The case for leaving it alone writes itself every time the phones ring.

All the same, the costs of leaving it alone are real, even if they are spread across budgets and never really get added up. There’s the maintenance premium, the integration project that quoted triple because of "the phone system," the compliance workaround, the feature the brand standard now expects that the platform cannot accommodate.

In short, the status quo has a compounding cost.

The Ceiling Is Set by the Oldest Component

Every operational priority in modern hospitality depends on systems exchanging information, from task routing and connected guest data, to survivable architecture and verifiable compliance flows. An aging communications core caps all of this. Integrations happen at the level of the least capable system, and the least capable system is usually the oldest one.

This is why legacy risk belongs in the same conversation as guest experience and compliance. Whether it’s the allergen note that must reach the kitchen, the alert that must reach the far building, or the preference that should follow the guest, each one travels through the communications layer, and a platform designed before those requirements existed handles them through workarounds (if at all).

Frost & Sullivan finds that 89% of hospitality IT/telecom departments cite systems integration and managing multi-vendor solutions among their significant near-term challenges, and the same research reports that 90% of decision-makers plan to increase or maintain investments across a range of APIs, including voice, messaging, chatbot, email, provisioning, and video.

Both of these figures articulate the same requirement for communications that participate in workflows. A platform that predates the API economy sits out that entire agenda.

The Skills Clock Runs Independently

A legacy platform can be kept alive indefinitely in theory. In practice its lifespan is set by people: the administrators who know its configuration language, the engineers who can troubleshoot it, the channel partners who still stock the cards. That population shrinks on its own schedule, with no regard for the property's capital plan. Frost & Sullivan finds 86% of hospitality IT/telecom departments cite skills shortages, including AI skills, among their significant near-term challenges.

What exacerbates the issue is that the new skills are a scarce commodity. The integration, cloud, and AI capabilities that modernization requires are the same ones every other industry is hiring for. This is how a property can find itself paying a premium to both keep the past running and to build the future, with the same constrained IT budget covering both.

Modernization Carries Its Own Risk, and Operators Know It

Replacing a core communications platform is genuinely risky, and hospitality is among the hardest places to do it. A hotel has no maintenance window in the ordinary sense, in that the building never closes, the guests never leave all at once, and consequences are dire when communications drop with a full house. A cruise ship poses even more complex constraints, in that its one true maintenance window is drydock — days long, booked years ahead, and shared with every other trade that needs the ship to be stationary.

In Frost & Sullivan's study, 85% of IT/telecom departments cite managing the migration of communications capabilities to the cloud among their significant near-term challenges.

Frost & Sullivan describe modernization under these conditions as a program undertaken in stages, in contrast to a single cutover project with a go-live date. In practice, that means phased moves that keep the property operating, hybrid states that are planned stages with end dates, and sequencing that retires the riskiest dependencies first.

The expertise for the journey can also be brought in for the duration. Over half of hospitality IT/telecom departments already use managed services for call control, contact center, network, compliance, and business continuity needs, and most expect to increase that use, according to Frost & Sullivan. Migration expertise is scarce, expensive, and needed only for the duration, which is precisely the profile of a capability to contract, and a poor one to put on payroll.

Making the Status Quo Compete

The incumbent system should have to win its place in the architecture the same way a replacement would.

• Total the real cost of the current platform. Maintenance premiums, integration surcharges, compliance workarounds, and the staff time spent nursing it sit in different budgets. Total them for a single year.
• Date every dependency. For each core system, record the support-end date, the number of people who can service it, and the age of its youngest expert.
• Sequence by exposure, and by what each move unlocks. The platform blocking a compliance requirement or a survivability gap moves first. A modern core is also the prerequisite for most of the integration agenda, so early moves should be chosen partly for what they make possible next.
• Decide what to keep in-house and what to contract. The migration needs skills the property will use once; operating the result needs skills it will use daily. Managed services, staff augmentation, and training are answers to different halves of that problem.

Date the Stack

List every system that carries guest requests, staff coordination, or emergency communication. For each: the year installed, the support status, and the name of the person who fixes it when it breaks. Where the third column holds one name, or a company that no longer exists, the property's modernization schedule has already been determined. The remaining choice is whether it’s the property or a failure that sets the date.

How Mitel can help

Mitel has been retiring its customers' oldest systems for decades, with defined migration paths, deployment models that let a property move in stages, and the expertise to run the journey. Fifty years in hospitality means Mitel has already modernized every vintage of platform still in a basement or below decks. 

Ready to see what this looks like on your property? Talk to Mitel or a certified Mitel partner for an assessment: [Contact sales →]