By Adam Raphael, 20 February 2007 11:50
COMMENT
Lending his support to silicon.com's 'Fair Wi-fi' campaign Adam Raphael, editor of influential hotel bible The Good Hotel Guide, explains why the days of rip-off charges must be numbered.
No one likes being ripped off. Yet over the past year, in my position as editor of The Good Hotel Guide, I have been getting an increasing number of complaints about wi-fi access charges.
However, it was not until I went to stay at the Hotel Felix, a boutique hotel just outside Cambridge, that I saw for myself what the moans were about. On the front desk there was a notice saying the charge for wi-fi was £5 per hour or £20 per day.
Though I travel with my laptop, there was no way I was going to pay that sort of money. So soon after returning to my London base, I phoned the Felix's general manager who claimed the hotel's charges were competitive. However, she admitted, as a result of mine and other guests' complaints, she had rung around other Cambridge hotels and had decided to slightly reduce the wi-fi access charge to £4.50 per hour or £14 per day.
Hotels are, of course, in the business of making money but there is a fine line between helping the bottom line and extortion. In London, in particular, the charges are often outrageous, ranging from The Dorchester's £50 flat-rate access fee to The Carlton Tower's £10 for the privilege of half an hour's access in its lobby.
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In my view, it is counter-productive for a luxury hotel to charge for small extras which should be met within the overall bill. Nothing irritates our readers more than finding they have been billed £3 for a paper after spending £300 per night on a pokey central London room. Hotels wouldn't dare charge extra for heating, water, clean towels or soap, so why should they charge for wi-fi access which for many businessmen is equally important?
The fact that hotels have lost an important source of revenue in telephone calls because of the mobile phone is not a sufficient excuse for over-charging. Hoteliers deny this strongly and say that providing and maintaining wi-fi costs them a lot of money. But how convincing is this excuse? Facilities, such as lifts or even background music systems cost a lot more but no hotelier makes a separate charge for them.
As for wi-fi installation and maintenance costs, they have been much exaggerated particularly by those with a vested interest in supplying hotels.
A basic system which is accessible only in the hotel lounge can be installed for a couple of hundred pounds. Obviously if a five star hotel wants to fit a state-of-the-art system which covers every room then that will cost more, perhaps in the tens of thousands.
But over an estimated five-year lifetime, that is still peanuts. Most hotels unfortunately haven't a technological clue and I suspect are being ripped off in exactly the same way as their guests. Some of the more sophisticated hoteliers have realised that providing free wi-fi access is an important marketing tool.
Business travellers may be a captive audience but they don't like being ripped off even if they are on expense accounts.
Adam Raphael is editor of The Good Hotel Guide - an independent guide which takes no money, no advertising and no hospitality from hotels.
Comments
There are 3 comments. Join the discussion
1. Ian Proud
Whenever you stay in a hotel, anywhere in the world, submit a report on the hotel's wi-fi service on www.tripadvisor.com If it is free then praise it and if it charges for the service then comment on it as you see fit. Then whenever you plan to stay in an hotel check on www.tripadvisor.com for comments on its wi-fi service. This will take time to generate sufficient customer feedback, but as most hotels are very aware of the advantages of positive reports on tripadvisor.com such customer feedback could influence them as to the value of providing a good wi-fi service, preferably free.
PS I have no connection with tripadvisor.com apart from being an avid user of it when checking out hotels.
2. anonymous
A hotel may invest a few hundred pound in a background music system, which will benefit all visitors, but the investment will be good for twenty years or more. It may alsobepart of an emergency evacuation system, which coukld be used for real life or death situations.
Investing in technology whims that may only have a life of a year or two, before new standards are being demanded is amore expensive business, and what about technical support costs?
However, having stayed at a dutch hotel recently, €5.50 bought an hours worth of access which could be used over the entire period I stayed there, not just withuin 24 hours. As syncronisation with exchage only takes a few minutes each day, the overall cost for access was low compared with rip off Britain.
3. Simon
"couple of hundred pounds"? No... Try getting an ISP to install a line and line rental over a year for a couple of hundred pounds. Then try to get an engineer to come out for a day for less then a cople of hundred pounds and then add on the inevitable IT support you will need.
Having installed Wifi in hotels in my area I can assure you that most managers of smaller hotels want to offer Wifi as a service and many have concluded that a no frills approach (for free) is the way forward.
But they are easily investing far more in time and money than " a couple of hundred ". Maybe they will conclude that providing this service, with little or none of the promised return isn't worth the candle.