> This was in the age when the price of a hotel room was directly correlated with the price of the WiFi service
That's odd. I used to feel that the price of wifi in hotels was inversely correlated with the hotel room price.
That's odd. I used to feel that the price of wifi in hotels was inversely correlated with the hotel room price.
smaller hotels need to compete for more discerning budget oriented travellers who will only pay charges seen as reasonable, or start avoiding hotels seen as fleecing.
I think of there wasn’t free wifi, Id just tether of the phone.
I haven’t travelled in years, but just checked my current software and it’s still there today.
Especially since the payment process at those upscale hotels often was/is seperate from the room-paying process and was a total hassle (making an account through some crappy GUI, entering credit card details manually, etc).
It definitely felt super cheap and greedy to me when I stayed in those up-scale hotels for work and wanted to use wifi.
They wouldn't/couldn't just add it to my room invoice either so I would have had to manually pay on a personal card, and expense each day. From memory the portal did not accept my card on the first try either.
I'll take my boycott of them for this slight to my grave.
Are mid-range businessy hotels really working with such slim margins that its worth alienating customers like this?
That’s the leading hypothesis: those hotels court business travelers who will have someone else foot the bill.
And often the 1½-star motel would just have a single AP in the office serving the whole horseshoe of rooms directly, while the big fancy hotel would need several APs per floor which made it a vastly more expensive and complicated deployment. If the cheap one was acting weird, the desk clerk could just power cycle it and most issues were resolved moments after one phone call. But everybody at the big hotels was afraid to touch it (probably had been instructed not to), and resolving problems took hours or days.
Our big two 'budget' (haha) hotel chains, Premier Inn and Travelodge both charge for barely usable Wi-Fi. The former offering an unlimited free service but restricted to about 500kbps and a paid 'ultimate' service which runs at about 10mbps. The latter giving you 30 mins free and then you have to pay, unless you're in one of their premium rooms where its included. Total racket supplied by Virgin WiFi for both. Thankfully don't often need it with better 4G/5G signal but sometimes the rooms can be Faraday cages.
Most of the more posh hotels I've been to have free unlimited decent WiFi.
This of course isn't always true, but it does provide a strong price anchor. Importantly, the GSA historically separated per-diem for the hotel stay, food and beverage expenses, and "add-on amenities", which included things like WiFi. This is a major factor for why hotels historically charged for WiFi at higher priced places targeted at businesses (e.g. may have an attached conference center or meeting spaces) vs hotels targeted at personal travelers.
The expensive larger hotel would have a fancy barely working system from Cisco that monitored and limited bandwidth. Sometime, however, there would be an Ethernet Jack under the table that would give you full 100mb/s.
(English is not my first language).
"Correlation" can mean almost any kind of relationship where a change in one variable follows a change in another. "Smoking is correlated with lung cancer".