Digital event and meeting room signs for hotels

A screen outside an event or meeting room needs to tell someone in the corridor two things at a glance: is this the right room, and what's on in it now. Put a small screen by each door, show the room name and the current booking, and have the signs read from the same calendar or table your events team already keeps. Then they change over between bookings on their own, and nobody spends the morning walking round with laminated sheets and Blu Tack.

What each door sign needs

The room name comes first, big, and it's on the screen all the time. Delegates looking for the Garden Suite (or whatever yours is called) are scanning doors from a few metres away, and that's the word they're looking for.

Under it goes the booking: the event name and the times. For anything confidential, "Private event" or "Private meeting" is enough. Corporate clients sometimes don't want their company name on a sign in a public corridor, so ask when they book. If there's space, a line with the next booking helps the events team as much as the guests.

When nothing's booked, the screen still needs to show something sensible. In Casty every screen has a default layout that plays whenever nothing else is scheduled, so set it to the room name with your logo. It's also a decent spot to mention that the room can be hired, with who to ask.

Where the bookings come from

The signs are only as good as the information behind them, and you don't want anyone typing the same booking into three places. There are a few ways to feed them.

If your bookings live in an online calendar that gives you an iCal address, the Calendar widget can show those events on a layout. Its settings let you choose which events to show and leave out ones that have already finished. A calendar per room makes each door sign simple: the sign for a room reads that room's calendar.

If your events team works from a spreadsheet, a dataset may suit you better. It's a small table kept in Casty, with columns such as Room, Event, Start and End, and you can type rows in or import a CSV file. The DataSet widget can filter rows, so each door sign shows only its own room's bookings, while the lobby screen shows the whole list. The datasets guide covers both the table and the import.

And if your booking system can publish bookings at a web address as JSON or CSV, a dataset can fetch them on a timer, with no retyping at all. That needs details from your booking provider, so email us and we'll go through it with you.

The signs only display bookings. Taking a booking still happens in your own system, and the signs follow whatever it says.

Branded signs for a client's event

Conference and corporate clients often like their logo on the door, and it's an easy thing to offer. Ask for the logo when the booking's confirmed, ideally as a PNG with a transparent background and as large as they've got, because a logo from an email signature looks fuzzy on a screen.

Build an event sign template once in your own style, with spaces for the client's logo, the event name and the times. For each event, make a layout from the template, swap in the logo and words, and schedule it to that room's screen for the hours of the event. For a three-day conference, set the times for the first day and repeat it daily until the last day.

If the room's normal sign is scheduled all day, the two will take turns, because overlapping events in Casty play in turn. To make the branded sign win, give its event a priority of 1. It then takes over the screen for exactly the hours you set and hands back afterwards. Priority, interrupts and overlays explains how priority works.

Changing over between events

Ballrooms and function rooms can host a conference in the day and a wedding reception in the evening. Schedule each with its own start and end time and the sign switches at the changeover. Before a busy day, check it in the schedule's agenda view: pick a specific point in time (say 17:30) and it lists exactly what each screen will play then, with priorities.

Put all the room signs in one display group, say Function rooms, so anything that should appear on every door (a fire drill notice, a "lunch is served in the restaurant" slide) can be scheduled once. Name each screen after its room, so the schedule and the screen list make sense at a glance. Running screens across several venues has more on naming and groups if you run more than one hotel.

The hardware by the door

Door signs are usually small portrait screens, mounted at eye height beside the door. Displays with the Casty player built in suit this well, because there's one power lead and no box to hide in a corridor. The devices page lists the Samsung, LG, Sony, Philips and Hisense displays that run it.

Plan power and network for each door position early, ideally with whoever's doing the electrics. Casty players store their layouts and media, so a sign keeps playing if the internet drops. A calendar feed or a dataset that fetches from another system needs the connection to pick up new bookings, though, so wired network points are worth it where you can get them. Wi-Fi or wired goes into the choice.

The lobby is the other half of this. A screen listing all of today's events and rooms, reading from the same source as the door signs, gets people heading the right way before they reach the corridor. Hotel lobby screens covers that screen.