The latest report on the state of Wi-Fi in hotels from HotelChatter: The site rounds up information each year, focusing both on cost and availability, although cost is the main criterion. HotelChatter writes up its best and worst hotels chains, as well as summarizing which properties offer free service and which offer paid Wi-Fi or Internet access. There's also detail about whether hotels have Wi-Fi in rooms or in lobbies.
There's a telling quote in the worst list, topped by Thompson Hotels ($10 or more per day for Internet access in lobbies or rooms), from the COO:
"This is an a la carte service that not every guest was using and we were paying for it whether they used it or not. That's why we have started charging guests for internet."
That's a terribly silly thing to say. If the service is contracted out, the hotel should only be paying for actual sessions, and shouldn't be paying much these days unless the chain wrote a terrible contract. If the service is run in house, then the hotel firm has largely fixed expenses that it should be dividing out by more users.
Some hotel executives have said they have to build the $10 a night into every room rate, even if the service isn't used, and that's ridiculous, too.
The hard cost of a day's access by a guest is likely well under a dollar for a venue in which there's no cost to access. Charge, and you have vastly less usage, and thus your per-guest cost goes up. If hotels work with aggregators, they're already getting pennies per session, not dollars, so that reality already exists. Sell an extra room night per night or having the ability to bump rates up slightly for everyone because access easily offsets the cost of the service.
Ultimately, the balance will tip and most hotels will offer Internet service at no cost, at which point all remaining hotels will be at a competitive and loyalty disadvantage.
Atom Feed (xml)