Still an independent, family owned regional brewer, St Austell Brewery is part of the fabric of the South West. They have some gems of hotels and traditional inns in really beautiful locations like Hope Cove, Padstow and the Isles of Scilly. Welcome has provided booking systems for their larger hotels since 1999 and now they have installed our Welcome Anywhere on-line booking system for 8 more of the smaller inns.

The beauty of this arrangement is that it provides each site with a booking chart and a customer database with Post Code lookups. There are no worries about backups, networks or specialised staff training. In addition, an accounts package allows them to check-in from the arrivals list, link to tills and provide guests with their bills instantly even when the internet is down or running slowly. The head office part of the package includes a Central Reservations module and the facility to supervise and assist each of the different locations. Shelley Tookey, area manager at the Brewery, says "We were looking for a solution to the reservation book, Welcome-Anywhere offers us the right package that we can tailor to each individual business, at a very surprisingly reasonable price! Once we have completed the roll out to all our accommodation houses, we will go live with the online booking facility. Welcome-Anywhere has brought us up to date in technical terms and no doubt will improve customer satisfaction in our booking process."

New Telephone Interfaces   

New Links are now availalable to Mitel and Samsung switchboards, as well as the Tiger call-management software. These use the TCP/IP protocol, which are much more reliable than the old serial interfaces.

This makes it possible to set wake-up calls from the front desk. Another useful feature for receptionists is the ability to bar calls for no-credit guests, such as those who pay in full on arrival. Normally, this program bars all calls from a room on departure and opens the line automatically on arrival.

We have been working with Micron Communications on recent telephone installations and, in case you need to upgrade your phone system, we are happy to recommend them. visit
www.microncommunications.co.uk

Tiger is another company we can recommend. They can be reached at
www.tigercomms.com

Advice About Passwords

Here are 10 simple rules. There has recently been a great deal of publicity about security of personal data. Beware, it’s not too difficult for hackers to write programs that will try all the likely options. Follow these rules and you can make it much harder for anyone wishing to crack your password.

1. Don’t use anything obvious like date of birth, home address, children’s names or pet’s names.
2. Don’t use anything short. 6 characters should be a minimum.
3. Don’t use numbers only, especially not sequential or repeating numbers like 1234 or 666.
4. Ordinary words are a bad plan. Think of joining 2 random words together and include some numerals as well as upper and lower case letters.
5. The best passwords are hard to remember so, if you need to write it down, disguise it. Part of it could be a simple word. Remember that and write down the rest, which should be a really nasty mixture of numbers and letters like w39PD1t
6. That second part should be changed often.
7. Don’t email it or post it to anyone. In fact, don’t put it on your PC at all. When the PC offers to save your password, say no if you want to keep it secure.
8. Don’t put it on a piece of paper that gives away what it is for. For instance don’t put it in the top drawer of your desk or the back of your diary.
9. Don’t leave your PC unattended without logging out.
10. Also set your screensaver to lock the PC after times of inactivity.
    

The Team at Welcome