Hotel Wi-Fi – Relatively cheap free publicity | Hacker News Reader

Hotel Wi-Fi – Relatively cheap free publicity

economist.com

51 pointsedward29 comments

>IN YEARS to come we will look back at hotels that charged for Wi-Fi with a kind of incredulous nostalgia. But how far in the future will that be?

I think more importantly, most people will stop caring if hotels provide wifi. I already rarely connect to free wifi because I have a cellphone - when I use my laptop I can just tether.

The two main blockers for most people (at least Americans) are cell providers who charge insane rates for tethering and international roaming. Tmobile has revealed that it's possible to provide both at a reasonable rate ("T-Mobile CEO John Legere has estimated that profit margins on international roaming fees can be about 90 percent"), so the current situation is just an inefficiency that will eventually die off.

To me, we should still encourage hotels to do the right (modern) thing. But we really should be pushing our cell providers to remove the inefficiencies that prevent us from using our connections conveniently.

> I think more importantly, most people will stop caring if hotels provide wifi.

I will stop caring once international roaming fees stops being a thing. I hope that like you mention it eventually dies off, but right now, I have to assume I'll be offline every time I travel abroad.

It's slowly getting better overall. In Europe, recent laws were passed that forced the mobile ISPs hands and it's now possible in several countries to get service anywhere in the EU as if it were your home country.

It makes far more sense to simply buy an international SIM card upon arrival. In Thailand for example you can get seven days unlimited 3G (faster than in the usa) for just $5 at 7/11. Now that carriers must unlock phones you can do this far more easily.

The downside is you get a new phone number. If you travel frequently it might make sense to abandon calling altogether and simply setup an SIP forwarding solution.

Also cell phones often don't work well in hotel buildings.

I stayed at the Thompson in Beverly Hills and couldn't use the phone in my room thanks to the rebar in the building frame and the fact that it's about as easy to put a cell phone tower up in BH as it is to open a pot dispensary.

Later on I stayed in a hotel in a less substantial building that was at the very foothills of the Hollywood Hills, about three blocks from the El Capitan Theatre. My phone didn't even work outside because of the insane topography.

If it happens to be a larger hotel, they could perhaps talk to the telcos about setting up femtocells inside the building.

On that note I was quite surprised that DESY [1] in Hamburg has done exactly that - had perfect cell reception ~30m underground (was taking a tour of HERA accelerator [2]).

[1] http://www.desy.de/index_eng.html [2] http://www.desy.de/research/facilities__projects/hera/index_...

One big trouble with small cells is politics.

At least historically the EU has standardized on GSM so you can install one set of small cells that everybody can roam to.

In the US we have long had the CDMA vs GSM divide and we've even had other protocols in use. At the very least you need to support two different protocols in the US.

I think also being a government agency a place like DESY would either let the phone companies put the small cells in for free or maybe even pay a small amount to put them in. (Our neighbors across the street paid about $200 for a Verizon network femtocell so my CDMA phone works if I stand at my mailbox)

On the other hand I think the hotels would expect to get paid to add small cells just like the phone companies pay for tower space for macrocells.

Charging for hotel wifi is about price discrimination. The only people willing to pay $25/day for in-room wifi are business travelers who aren't paying for it themselves anyways.

That's why you're more likely to pay for wifi at a business hotel (Marriott/Hilton) than you are at a tourist hotel. It's also why you're more likely to pay for it at a more expensive hotel than a less expensive hotel.

Frequent business travelers care a lot more about reward stays than they do about free wifi (because they're not paying for it, and because the loyalty program will give it to them for free).

The article reads more like a press release for a social media agency (which is who they quote in most of the article) than it does an actual analysis of why hotels charge for Wifi.

I've also heard that there's service-quality expectations at play: if the wifi is free and it sucks, you're still happy while the hotels that charge for wifi to simply reduce demand (congestion) in order to have a better experience (speed/bandwidth) for those who actually pay.

And it's further complicated by the value of ppv entertainment to the hotel - if Netflix/Hulu/whatever works just fine on the hotel wifi, the hotel is losing revenue. Cheap hotels with crapy free internet don't have to worry about that, but hotels that charge are also trying to recoup lost ppv entertainment revenue.

It is one of those funny things that if you stay at a cheap hotel you get free WiFi but you always get charged extra for it at an expensive hotel.

And in some developing countries you can actually get an adequate low-end hotel room (with free wifi) for less than the wifi surcharge at some of the chains.

Actually in the US you can find some 'alternative' places to stay under $30 a night. A "hostel" with a shared shower is not bad at all if you're the only adult who wakes up early in the morning.

It seems like there's always a Starbucks next door to the hotel or across the street so I just go use theirs.

I hate when cafes set their DHCP lease to 24-hours or so.. nobody is in the shop and you can't get an IP address..

I usually ask them to reboot their router, proceed to log into the admin panel with device's default user/pass (which works most of the time), and set some sane 30min lease.

it's a free public service.

Recently stayed in a series of lower-middle end hotels in the UK, Premier Inn charged me £3 for 24hrs of wifi the first time I was there and then gave it to me for free on subsequent stays at the same hotel.

Holiday Inn (which is priced about half a tier higher than Premier Inn and has restaurants, gyms, and things like that which Premier Inn does not) wanted to charge me £26 for 24 hours.

In fact, I googled just now to confirm that I'd remembered Premier Inn's policy and see that they've coincidentally announced today that normal wifi will now be free and you only have to pay for fast wifi (fast enough for streaming media). That's obviously a much better deal and I wouldn't be surprised if a few years from now they make that free as well.

I think a lot of e-commerce sites have figured out the same thing with free delivery. I don't know why but I feel it myself as a customer.. if I pay the price I see and don't end up having all extra charges tacked on at the end, I'm more likely to hit Buy than try and search for the same item on Amazon or wherever.

FWIW, as someone who works online and is a YouTube junkie, I would happily pay for Internet at a hotel if it were actually good. It's a very rare occasion I can get a good connection and don't end up using my 3G instead. Merely getting the equivalent of a regular DSL connection would make me happily stump up a good $10-20 but it's NEVER that good.

>A study by Resonance, a tourism consulting firm, found that travellers worth more than $1m say that free Wi-Fi is the amenity they value most when choosing a destination

IME many wealthy people don't mind paying a premium but don't want to be inconvenienced. The point of staying at a luxury hotel is to be catered to and pay a lump sum at the end of your stay. Jumping through hoops to get past the payment portal on each device your group is carrying is annoying.

I recently stayed at a Starwood property and the wifi fee was approaching 10% of the overall price of the stay.

I would not have needed it but the t-mobile network coverage was very poor inside the hotel.

I don't understand what it is that makes companies so short-sighted. They're so focused on the immediate cost of something that they forget the long-term value they reap from customers that keep coming back. Companies need to take the long view rather than squeezing customers for every penny they can.

Perhaps they know more than we do. Perhaps it's mostly business guests that are likely to return, and they don't pay for WIFI themselves. Possibly tourists are more sensitive to price and more likely to book with the competition if the room costs $2 more.

I think they're just slow to adapt.

When hotels first started rolling out WiFi, charging made lots of sense. Most guests couldn't or wouldn't use it, and those who did would be happy to pay a little extra for internet on the go.

Things have changed now. Everybody uses WiFi, and it's available all over. A hotel charging extra for internet access is now almost like charging extra for lights in the room.

What makes it especially bad now is that fast cellular internet is becoming ubiquitous. People appreciate WiFi because it doesn't chew up their data plan, but they'll be ever less likely to pay for it.

That's why they waive the charge for their loyal customers.

5 stays or 15 nights in a year at Hyatt and you get Platinum status which includes free wifi (though Hyatt just made wifi free at all their properties). At Hilton it's 20 stays or 40 nights for gold but you can find a fast-track offer and get that status after 4 stays, or just hold certain credit cards (plus free breakfast, gym access, some upgrades, etc).

WSJ also has an article about this phenomenon with some more details around how each chain approaches the issue; worth a read if you travel... http://www.wsj.com/articles/pay-for-wi-fi-only-at-a-luxury-h... including mention of www.hotelwifitest.com to share wifi quality (or lack thereof) data.

> IN YEARS to come we will look back at hotels that charged for Wi-Fi with a kind of incredulous nostalgia. But how far in the future will that be?

then

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I'm feeling a bit of a knotted irony here.

Although irrelevant now don't hotels still charge crazy amounts for the in room phone?

As network access becomes more ubiquitous for the residential market, charging for that access at a hotel will look increasingly like charging a separate fee for the water or electricity to be turned on in the room.

People expect most of the normal comforts of their own home when visiting a hotel. Any place that fails to deliver without also charging extra nickel-and-dime fees for those comforts will rightly get negative reviews.

Imagine if your final bill included charges like this:

- Toilet Flush fee: 4 x $1.99

- Elevator Use fee: 10 x $0.99

- Room Electricity fee: 318.2 kWh x $0.49

- Linens Rental fee: 1 x $9.99

- Television Watching fee: 3 h x $1.99

- Tiny Soaps and Shampoo Bottles: 5 x $1.99

- Wi-Fi Access fee: 1 x $9.99

It fits right in, doesn't it?

TBH, I'd be okay with that if the prices were reasonable and the base room fee was adjusted accordingly.

Hotel Wi-Fi is annoying, slow, AND expensive.

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