Project overview‍

Leisure Resorts are a provider of five-star holiday home experiences, promising holiday home ownership and rental customers a high-end, luxury staycation whenever they're on park.

With smart tech on an exponential rise across all generations, Leisure Resorts needed on-site connectivity that reflects their brand promise of excellence, whatever demands are placed on it.

Learn more about how we delivered a seamless, dynamic connectivity solution that's fit for the smart tech era at their Aysgarth and Ullswater locations.

The challenge: a run down park with no infrastructure or fibre internet connectivity in a remote, countryside location

Prior to Leisure Resorts ownership, the site was in a poor condition. Having replaced all of the lodges, the vision of the Leisure Resorts CEO was one of a boutique luxury retreat.

With such a proposition comes the expectation of high-performance WiFi. The growing popularity of smart tech only added to the urgent requirement for a world-class WiFi experience. People should be able to relax, kick back, and enjoy high-quality connectivity on-park without having to worry about a thing. More so now, than any other time before it - by design, it was perfectly aligned for the increased demands and expectations of the staycation experience.

Burrowed in the heart of the remote Yorkshire Dales National Park, the location posed a big challenge - a part of the world renowned for its beauty, but not necessarily its high-speed connectivity. Ullswater was similar; a remote, picturesque location, but not one synonymous with top-notch WiFi.

That's where we were able to come to the rescue.

Our solution: 1Gb of Internet connectivity and a hospitality IPTV streaming distribution solution

Having engineered a fibre-optic network and distribution cabinets, the first big challenge was to get a lease line circuit into the park in time for the grand opening – which we succeeded in. Anyone with experience of project managing BT Openreach will now how good or bad that process can be.

TV aerials and poles are unsightly, and due to the location, most of the lodges, were not aligned for a TV signal. The brief – no ariels were to be installed in any lodges. Furthermore, as this was a Rental Fleet park, they wanted users to have a hotel type of TV experience. We installed a central Free Sat Dish and Terrestrial TV Ariel and used a Hospitality IP TV Streaming solution to distribute TV channels via our data network. This allowed our data network to broadcast many terrestrial TV channels which were incorporated within a hospitality TV interface/menu system, rather than the channel navigation from a domestic TV. This hospitality menu solution provides feature rich content about local services, walks, restaurant bookings, menus, takeaways and late checkouts.

At Ullswater, because the park was a mix of Holiday Home Ownership and Rental Fleet, we had to cater for the 'home from home' experience, as well as Sky Q. In this instance we installed a central TV ariel and Satellite Dish and used our fibre optic network to deliver both Terrestrial and Sky Satellite signals to every holiday home. Importantly, an IP streaming Signal distribution solution wasn't applicable for this park. Overall, our object was to independently serve a signal to every TV, bringing the all-important home-from-home experience to every lodge on park.

For both Parks we delivered all of the infrastructure to make that happen. We provided a fibre-optic infrastructure, distribution cabinets, and a wireless solution, using a common SSID and a unique password – in turn creating a private network for all the devices within a lodge to communicate with each other, to cast or screen share to a TV.

The result: smart lodges, fit for the future

Old and new generations of holiday home owners have a fondness for smart tech, a trend that the global pandemic has accelerated.

In five or so years, terrestrial TV may be a distant memory, but, for now, we're currently in somewhat of a transition period; our solution caters to this as well as serving as a launchpad for the smart era.

Lodges are becoming ever smarter - and connectivity to support this is precisely what we delivered for Leisure Resorts' locations in Ullswater and Aysgarth.

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