Swedish integration form Fremlab landed a hotel hat-trick when it was tasked with handling the AV installation for three hotels. Nial Anderson spoke with Fremlab’s owner Carl-Fredrik Malmgren about the projects.
The Swedish hotel chain Elite traces its roots to the arrival of Indian student Bicky Chakraborty who came to the University of Stockholm in 1966.
Seeing student rooms sitting empty during the summer holidays Chakraborty struck upon the idea of hiring these rooms out to tourists. A trend toward motel-type accommodation on the outskirts of towns and cities meant older hotels in urban centres were closing down which allowed Chakraborty to began slowly acquiring these properties to refurbish them. Today Elite consists of 26 hotels throughout Sweden and the company remains the only family-owned Swedish hotel chain.
During the last 40 years the requirements for more sophisticated AV installations in these hotels, which in another era used to attract many local people to dances on the weekends, has been on the increase.
Swedish integration company Fremlab found itself in line to carry out the installations of no less than three Elite hotels over the course of the last 12 months. Fremlab’s owner Carl-Fredrik Malmgren first worked with Elite in the mid 1990s and has carried out the AV installation at two of the hotels in Helsingborg where his business is based, the Marina Plaza and the Mollberg. Most recently, he worked on the Elite Hotel Marina Tower that opened in 2010.
Fremlab carried out the installation at the Elite Ideon Gateway in Lund, a newly constructed building which had an AV budget of €220,000, and the Elite Grand Hotel in Gävle, which saw the renovation of a 1901 hotel building. This had an AV budget of €110,000.
Finally Fremlab carried out a smaller installation with a €25,000 budget at Elite Tower Hotel in Örnsköldsvik. The three hotels were opened in January, March and April 2013 respectively.
Malmgren said the standard of the installation was set at the Marina Plaza project back in 2010.
“I was awarded the project based on Fremlab’s experience working with the Elite Hotels company which had grown into a long-term relationship with a good level of trust,†he explained.
Swedish integration form Fremlab landed a hotel hat-trick when it was tasked with handling the AV installation for three hotels. Nial Anderson spoke with Fremlab’s owner Carl-Fredrik Malmgren about the projects.
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