I stayed at the Hilton hotel in San Diego this weekend, and overall a great experience. However there was a 10 dollar charge for internet for 24 hours usage at the property, and since I wasn’t on business, I wouldn’t be able to expense it.
Charging guests for internet access is like charging for water or the lights, and hotels that charge are missing a few business opportunities. Like what? Here’s a few suggestions, and then I’ll open it up to commenters to share their ideas:
- Providing free WiFi (like coffee shops have figured out) means I’m more likely to stay on property and spend more time and money on your hotel. It means I’m more likely to have business meetings in your restaurant or lounge and invite others to come and do business. We have expense reports and are likely to buy food and drink. We’ll access our web enabled devices at the pool, in the lounge, keeping our kids busy, and keeping us connected.
- Savvy hotels will create or foster location based social networks, that will encourage guests to rate and rank which restaurants, attractions, and self-support each other. As we rate and rank nearby attractions in the context of being a guest at your hotel, that centralizes our experiences with your brand –we’ll tell our network about the great we had our experience in and around as guests at your property.
- Develop a virtual concierge that will be a helpful guide to your guests, consider using twitter like the four seasons does, they even do this for their Palo Alto hotel, near my house. You can provide us a better experience if we’re connected to each other –and to you.
- Maybe we’ll spend more times learning from your leadership teams, like Bill Marriot’s blog. Hotels put a lot of marketing and service products in our hotel rooms like menus, spa treatments and concierge treatments, allow us to see these things online, not just in paper, giving us more opportunity to buy more.
I’m not picking on Hilton alone, as I’m told it varies on property per property basis, and there are many other hotels that charge for internet, but as a general rule of thumb, provide a better experience to guests so you can connect with other –and you. When I travel on personal trips, I’m going to consider free internet access as a major factor to my decision on where to stay.
Update: Here’s a handy guide of which hotels charge who have internet access and how much they charge. About 22 of the 44 hotel chains charge for internet, and some don’t even offer it (motel 6). Many of you expressed agreement with my post (and a ton more in Twitter) so I hope this helps in your decision making.
It’s really unfortunate that this post has a reason to exist but from Hilton’s to Hyatts and many of the other names in between I’ve seen this same issue again and again and it never makes sense.
Your comments show many benefits to the bottom line for opening up Wifi access and I think we can all brainstorm many, many more. From a social media perspective I’ve always thought there is a big missing play in having you rate / comment on your hotel stay (in real time perhaps) when you login. Giving me free access when so many others do not is a great way to help get that positive rating.
Some properties are learning but I get the feeling hotels are treating this much like parking. Easy revenue to make the average stay increase in value. But the long term customer experience impact is terrible and doesn’t build loyalty.
Good post, agree totally. It’s silly short-term thinking. (At the moment I’m staying at the Conde Luna hotel in León, Spain. But… I’m typing this in a nearby cafe with free Wifi, since the hotel charges € 10 a day and this for a very slow or often simply not functioning connection! I’ve heard that the manager wants to improve it, but the owner still lives in the middle ages and doesn’t think internet is too immportant…)
Unbelievable!!! Well, this is one of the many things that pops up in a downturn economy.
While I agree I’m cynical it will change, we need to remember that Hotels have for years charged totally outrageous phone rates even for a local call.
If after decades of cost reduction in telecoms this has had no effect on the charged rate (to the point most of us use our cell phones) why would they start listening now. It’s shortsighted but for a Hotel internet access is simply another infrastructure service they need to maintain. Hopefully Jeremiah some will read your post and change their approach.
…and as many replies point out remember free internet is a distinctly American novelty in all my overseas ventures I have had to pay in one way or another.
This has been one of my pet peeves for a long time. Internet access is still seen by too many hotels as a optional extra. Internet, especially for business travelers, is as essential as towels in the bathroom. Still too many hotels make it unclear as to whether they charge for internet at booking time. I will never knowingly stay in a hotel that charges – it is clear I am not their target customer.
You make an excellent point Jeremiah — and I hope the Travel industry in general listens to it. Personally speaking, I rate having a good wifi/internet connectivity higher than a lot of other ameneties they offer. Folks in the hotel industry and travel industry in general need to realize the changing demographics, social structure, mindset, and preferences of the current population if they want continued growth (many are still using the business model they used 15 or 20 years ago).
Well put.
Great post. When did luxury become synonymous with nickel and dime? Shouldn’t a luxury experience be one where the little details (like Internet, newspapers and bottled water) magically disappear? It’s interesting to read some of the posts from hospitality industry insiders because you can see the entrenched line of thinking, reinforced by excuses about access and cost.
I would think that the Hampton Inn flag with it’s 2,800 properties has more rooms, requiring more infrastructure than the Hilton Flag. Yet Hampton has managed to outfit all (or at least most) of their properties with free wireless internet — all while providing a hot breakfast, free newspaper, free gym access, acceptably high thread count sheets, a good mattress, and a friendly staff — at a price around $120. And look! Their parking lots are packed!
Agree. I find it amazing that hotels feel the need to charge for internet access. I agree with your points about how they can leverage the internet more, but most hotels are at step -1. And what really is ironic is that my non statistically significant survey tells me that the more expensive the hotel, the more likely is that they will charge their guests. The cheaper hotels don’t charge as much. When I go to a nice hotel and they charge me, I can’t even get upset. I just shake my head in disbelief about their nickling and diming….
Amen! We just told the Le Meridien Hotel in San Francisco that we’d look to have our Committee (I’m a an appointee to a state commission) move us to another hotel in future if they didn’t start including free wifi with our room. (We alternate between a hotel that offers free wifi and one that doesn’t). We can’t expense wifi when attending these meetings but need it to stay in contact with our professional work. The sales manager said that they’d need to up the room rate to cover that. We told him they could bring that up with our travel coordinator, and we’d tell our staff that our preference would be to have wifi included. We told the sales manager to think about whether he really wanted to lose all our business for the sake of a $9.95 a day wifi charge. (As many as 20 of us at a time at these meetings) He said it was honestly helpful to get that feedback. I suggest you say something to the hotel manager when you leave. This kind of thing will only change — said our sales manager — if enough people speak up to let them realize they can lose business because of it.
Nothing new to add to this, as I agree with the posters who have said that it is ironic that the high end hotels charge for this while lower end hotels offer it for free. If I can walk into a coffee shop and get free wi-fi (to your first point), why shouldn’t I have free access somewhere I am already paying to stay at? Some hotels do get this though; I recently stayed at a Kimpton Hotel in Washington DC with free wi-fi for guests. They also seem to “get it” with tech in general though as they are leveraging Facebook, Twitter, and other Web 2.0 outlets.
There is one interesting twist on WiFi access in Las Vegas. Some of the hotels have wired-only pay access or their WiFi rate is very high. Third-party WiFi providers provide access to rooms through by having base stations outside the properties. Their services undercut the hotel prices — free enterprise at its best!
OK, sorry I™m a bit late to this, but would like to offer another side to this debate. It should be remembered that not all WiFi is equal, and that there is much evidence to show that guests will and do pay for a service they value. It™s all very well being happy to have got something for free but not if it didn™t meet your needs and therefore left you feeling dissatisfied. Hotels, especially business hotels, focus on guest satisfaction, and many have recognised that the type of WiFi service they can offer free of charge will leave their guests disappointed and therefore choose to charge guests for a superior service.
By superior service, I™m not implying that free WiFi is bad “ just that it might not have the features that many travellers expect. I™m talking about the sort of service that can handle bandwidth-hungry applications, provides enough IP addresses so that business people can connect to their corporate networks, protects the data on the laptop from theft or spam, and offers a free 24/7 multilingual helpline. Hoteliers are not experts in this field, therefore they rely on 3rd parties to provide the services their guests require now and are likely to require in the future.
And all this costs. Hotels may be reluctant to meet these costs for a service from which they are getting no revenue, and therefore start cutting back. Limited or no support, less bandwidth, no VPN compatibility, no WPA… Soon they™ll have dissatisfied guests.
Another way of handling this would be for hotels to offer both “ a free service up to a certain bandwidth and with limited features, then a paid-for service that has all the bells and whistles.
See recent post on how hotels are using Twitter to respond to customer complaints and reach potential guests. This is only good news for consumers. http://snipr.com/kaxsy [industry_bnet_com]
The messed up part about these highend hotels nickel and diming you is that places like the Baymont Inns and Days Inn supplies such services for free.
It really makes these high end places that you pay A LOT of money for….look really really cheap.
High End hotels are supposed to be about services. Yet The Days Inn and Baymont Suites supplies more services. I don’t get it.
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I was recently surprised to find that most Niagara Falls Hotels offer free Wi-Fi. And even better it was actually really fast, I hope in a few years every hotel will have realized the advantage of offering free internet access.
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