A hotel phone system, mapped like the property.
Walk a property and the phone system is four different jobs: guest rooms where 911 law is written for exactly this building, a front desk that is the PBX's real console, back-of-house extensions that just need to ring cheaply, and a trunk layer still billed like it's 1999. SIPNEX is an FCC-licensed carrier — we build all four zones, from the room phone to the circuit that replaces your PRI.
Four zones, four different phone problems.
Hotels don't buy a phone system the way an office does — the requirements change by floor plan. Room phones answer to federal 911 law. The front desk answers to guests. Back-of-house answers to radios it should replace. And the trunk layer answers to a PRI contract nobody has re-read in years. Map the building first and the buying decision falls out of it. (If your food-and-beverage outlet answers its own line, our restaurant phone system page covers that call flow by daypart.)
Guest rooms — where the law lives
Direct 911 dialing with no prefix, front-desk notification when it happens, and the room number delivered with the call. Kari's Law and RAY BAUM'S Act were written for this zone — details below.
Front desk — the PBX core
The console that owns every guest-facing ring: attendant menus for reservations versus the desk, ring groups across shifts, wake-up scheduling staying on the PBX you run, and voicemail that reaches a manager's email.
Back of house — extensions that just ring
Housekeeping supervisors, engineering, kitchen, loading dock, pool office. Extensions from $6.99/mo each, every feature included — cheap enough to put a phone wherever a radio keeps failing.
The trunk layer — what the building dials through
SIP trunks under the PBX you already run, replacing PRI circuits and their fixed channel counts. Elevator and life-safety lines get their own engineered path — never an afterthought on the guest trunks.
The room phone is a regulated device now.
Hotels are the canonical case for the multi-line telephone system rules. Kari's Law — in force for MLTS installed after February 16, 2020 — requires that a guest dialing 911 reaches 911 with no prefix or access code, and that the front desk or security is notified a 911 call was placed and from where. RAY BAUM'S Act adds dispatchable location: the street address plus the room number, conveyed with the call, so a responder isn't standing in a lobby with nothing but the building address. Both deadlines have passed. Meeting them is PBX dial-plan configuration plus carrier-side E911 provisioning of the numbers your system presents — SIPNEX registers dispatchable locations across the 50 US states, and our E911 requirements guide walks the full rule set, including the turn-up checklist we run on every property.
Retire the PRI. Keep the elevator honest.
Most properties still dial through PRI circuits sized in fixed 23-channel blocks — capacity you rent whether the house is full or dark. SIP trunks into the PBX you already run replace that with channels sized to occupancy; our guide on why T1 and PRI lines are dead makes the technical case. Two lines on the property are not invited to that migration by default: elevator phones and other life-safety paths carry their own code requirements — monitored answer, daily verification, standby power — spelled out in our elevator phone line requirements guide and handled line by line in our POTS replacement practice, sequenced before the guest-facing cutover rather than discovered after it.
Property phone questions, answered.
Do hotel room phones have to dial 911 directly?
What location does a 911 call from a guest room deliver?
Can a hotel replace its PRI without touching the guest-room phones?
What does a hotel phone system cost per room?
Do guest rooms still need a wired phone at all?
Can hotel elevator phones ride the same SIP trunks?
Bring us a room count and a trunk bill.
Rooms, front-desk stations, back-of-house extensions, and whatever the PRI costs today. The design comes back zone by zone: 911 provisioned room by room, trunks sized to occupancy, and the elevator lines sequenced first.