Ray Baum's Act information for the hotelier
As a hotel owner and manager one of your highest priorities is to keep your guest safe. Why do we secure outside doors at night? Have age requirements to swim alone? Not announce room numbers when issuing a key to a new guest? Have safety locks on guest room doors? We do this all in the name of providing a safe environment for our guests. So are you prepared for what to do when emergencies happen? Two new federal laws are focused on how the phone system can help improve the emergency process when things go wrong.
What happens when emergency situations arise? A fire at the hotel, a heart attack in a guest room or someone falls on an icy parking lot. These are all situations that do occur in hotels each month and require us to DIAL 911. So let’s look at what happens when an emergency call is dialed and what the hotel’s legal requirements are to meet federal law.
When you call 911 from a hotel phone, the street address is passed along to the Public Safety Answering Point, who in turn gives that information to the local emergency medical technician, police officer or fire department. So when they show up at your front desk, where are you going to send them to? Do you know where that call came from? What room or meeting area dialed 911?
So the Kari’s Law requirement was that the guest must be able to pick-up the phone and dial 911 without hitting any other numbers or access codes. Now we look at a complementary law called the Ray Baum’s Act and see how it applies to a hotel, motel or assisted living facility.
What is Ray Baum’s Act?
This federal law requires that you send a ‘dispatchable location’ that is associated with the emergency call. Up until now when someone dialed 911 it would simply give the Public Safety Answering Point operator a street address such as Lansing Hotel, 1234 Main Street, Springfield IL 00000. Now for the changes, you need to implement just add to this ‘dispatchable location’ making the communication now look like this: Lansing Hotel, 1234 Main Street, Springfield IL 00000 - Third Floor Room 302.
The second part of the law requires a hotel to implement notification to on-site personnel that emergency services have been contacted and what area of the hotel the call occurred. This would allow for staff to assist or more importantly help the emergency responder to navigate the building and access the room without delay.
How can you easily get compliant?
Motion VOIP, an expert in hotel technology consulting, for over 14 years can make this a headache-free process. Our staff is providing phone system evaluations FREE in many areas. Please fill out the form below to talk with one of our staff about your property.