Hotel no-fi

Since I'm in Sydney for the weekend, it was sort of necessary to find a place to stay. I've slept in the car before and really that's something I'd like to reserve for special occasions.

Since I like to think of myself as a man of the internet having a good connection for every waking moment. It makes me happy to see places embrace the online-always culture and offer free wifi to their clients. Companies like QLD Rail, Delta and even the London Underground have, or are soon rolling the service out.

What annoys me is how narrow minded a lot of hotel chains still are when it comes to providing online access to guests. The mentality is that online access is a luxury that guests must pay top dollar for low quality service. I could understand a little more if this were the early 90s where it would have been expensive for the hotel to be online and relevant technologies were sufficiently new to demand paying a premium. However, in 2012, is it too much to ask for free, high speed internet whilst I stay in hotels?

Having been a business customer a few times, and hopefully more in future, internet access is necessary for pre-meeting preparation, general worldly awareness and even just to stay in contact with people. As a pleasure user, heck I just want to read some blogs and browse Reddit!

Since the advent of mobile phone wifi modems it's all too easy to simply set my phone to broadcast and connect a laptop and tablet to browse late into the night, as I did last night!

I was able to stream video from vimeo, read a few articles using pulse/Google reader, post last night's blog article and yes I could even fit in one round of Draw Something. 

With all this in mind you might ask why I'm complaining about hotel wifi when it seems I am adequately prepared to deal with no access by simply tethering. 

There are two main reasons:

  • Sometimes you just don't got good signal
  • Stop being technology dinosaurs, get with the times and realise that offering it could make the difference between guests staying at your hotel or not. More and more so into the future. If you do not adapt, you will fail.
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