Printers and copiers for hotels

Four different print jobs under one roof

Most hotel print contracts are quoted on a single volume figure. That hides the fact that a hotel is running at least four unrelated workloads:

• Back office — reservations, accounts, HR, rotas. Ordinary mono office printing, and the least interesting part.
• Front desk — registration cards, folios, invoices. Low volume, but it has to work every time, at any hour.
• Food and beverage — menus, specials, table talkers, allergen information. Colour, short runs, often on heavier stock.
• Conference and events — delegate packs, signage, badges, room boards. Spiky and unpredictable.

Each has a different volume pattern and a different tolerance for failure. Averaging them into one number is how hotels end up with a machine that's wrong for three of the four.

Guest printing is its own problem

Guests need to print — boarding passes, tickets, documents for a meeting that got moved. How that happens is worth deciding deliberately rather than inheriting.

The version most hotels end up with is a PC in a corner of the lobby, or reception printing from a USB stick a guest hands over. Both work, and both have obvious problems: something plugged into your network by a stranger, and documents sitting in a tray where anyone can pick them up.

Print management software handles this more cleanly. A guest sends a job by email or a web upload, gets a code, and the job only comes out when they're standing at the device with the code. No network access, nothing left in the tray, and you can see what was printed if you ever need to. That's one of the things PaperCut is good at, and it's worth pricing alongside the hardware rather than bolting on afterwards.

Menus change more often than anyone budgets for

Menus are the workload that catches people out. They change seasonally, they change when a supplier changes, they change when a dish comes off, and allergen details have to be kept current whenever the ingredients move. Each of those is a short run in colour, often on heavier stock than an office device is happy with.

Two decisions follow. First, whether menus are printed in-house or sent out — a trade between cost per sheet and being able to reprint the same afternoon a dish changes. Second, if in-house, whether the device can actually take the media weight and hold colour consistently across a run. A machine specified on office paper will do it badly, and you'll find out on a Friday.

Guest data doesn't belong in an output tray

Registration cards, ID and passport copies taken at check-in, folios with payment details on them. This is personal data, some of it sensitive, and a printer in a back corridor is a poor place to leave it.

Secure release — where a job waits until the person who sent it enters a PIN or taps a card at the device — solves most of it and costs very little once the software is there anyway for guest printing. It also gives you a record of who printed what, which is the sort of thing that's much easier to have in place beforehand than to reconstruct afterwards.

Occupancy moves. Minimum volumes don't.

A committed minimum volume is a bet that your print stays flat. Hotel print doesn't — it tracks occupancy and event bookings, and both are seasonal. A commitment set against a strong summer gets paid for in February whether you print it or not.

If you're being billed the minimum rather than the meter for part of the year, that gap is worth quantifying before you renew. The cost check on our homepage annualises what you're paying now, which is the number that argument needs.

When the front desk printer fails at 2am

An office can wait until Monday. A hotel can't, and this is where hospitality print contracts differ most from the office contracts they're usually copied from.

Worth asking any supplier, us included: what hours does the service cover, and what happens outside them? Is there a spare device on site that front desk can fall back to, and does anyone on the night team know how to switch to it? Is response measured to a phone call, a remote session, or an engineer physically arriving? A contract written for Monday-to-Friday office hours is not a contract for a building that never closes.

More than one property

For a group, the questions change. You'll want cost visible per property rather than as one bill, consistent devices so staff moving between sites don't have to relearn anything, and ideally no print server sitting in a cupboard at each hotel waiting to be somebody's problem. Cloud-native print management removes that last one entirely, which is usually the deciding factor between the two PaperCut products.

What we'd ask you

• How many properties, and how many rooms at each.
• Whether guests need to print, and how they do it now.
• Whether menus are printed in-house, and how often they change.
• Whether you have conference or event space, and how spiky that gets.
• What cover you have overnight, and what you'd want.

That's usually enough to tell whether your current arrangement is sensibly specified before anyone talks about replacing it.

How we make our money

We supply print — equipment, leasing and managed print — so if a review points to moving, we may quote for that work ourselves, and you should read what we tell you about your current costs with that in mind. Where we're not the right fit we'll say so. And if your existing arrangement is already sensible, that's what you'll be told.

Related

• Printer contract renewal — notice periods and timings, if yours is coming up.
• PaperCut MF and Hive — guest printing, secure release and per-property reporting.
• How our contract review works
• Photocopiers and printing for schools
• Printing for law firms and professional services
• Printing for dental and healthcare practices
• Managed print across London and the South East