I just heard that hotels in the USA generally provides free internet/Wi-fi connection. In my experience, in Europe you mostly have to pay, and a pretty penny too, for a connection in hotels, although some cafes have free connections. Do these observations fit with your experiences?
Update: According to a 2009 survey (article), 32 of 80 surveyed USA hotels provide(d) free Net connection.
14 comments:
Very much so, though my experience from a couple of touring holidays in the States was that the cheaper the hotel/motel was, the greater the chance of the wi-fi access being free. Crazy but true.
Thanks. Somehow I'm not all that surprised.
What Pete suspects, I can confirm. I always try to stay at the cheapest, crappiest hotels--you get free internet, free breakfast, and the staff are generally more attentive. I've stayed at a number of plush hotels during conferences and I constantly had to beg forgiveness for having the audacity of staying there and annoying such illustrious people.
If anyone at that big Hotel in downtown L.A. is reading this, please accept my most sincerest apology for requesting a clean towel. Next time I arrive at a room and find the shower towel is dirty, I'll just be a man and use it nonetheless.
Mmmm, interesting.
One exception is that in the hotel lobby it's usually free.
My only experience has been in Ohio (3 times) and all the hotels provided free wi-fi, both those that provided breakfast and the only one that didn't. It was generally good (the last one was very good in a room and very slow in another, go figure).
Since in that area the hotels are all crammed up together in the same area, in some rooms you also get the wi-fi from the neighboring hotels.
I've often found that if your hotel doesn't have free wi-fi the one across the parking lot does. Mind you, been a year or so since I was in a hotel.
Having visited both expensive and cheap hotel, the quality of service provided is usually not based upon the hotel but rather the person getting the service. ;o)
It's a crapshoot, but at least at the bottom of the market one is not left feeling ripped off from paying for something useless. Best value: trust hospital with open hotspots throughout the facility, and free public desktops in the cafeteria--shame they were Windows machines. Worst value: convention center network that was overloaded to the point of being unusable, but they still charged $99/day and refused refunds under any circumstances.
$99 per day for just the Internet??! Wow. And I thought $15 per day in Copenhagen Marriott was bad enough, but this is just criminal.
I suspect that hotels catering mainly to businesses can get away with a lot because "the company pays".
Update: According to a 2009 survey (here), 32 of 80 surveyed USA hotels provide(d) free Net connection.
I work for an international air freight company, and have traveled extensively for them, in North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Apparently, free wifi has become a competitive necessity in the United States, but not so much elsewhere. Practically all of the major hotel chains in the U.S. offer free wifi in their rooms, the only exceptions being the so-called "luxury" hotel chains. (Maybe they feel if you can pay their high room rates, you can afford to pay for Internet access?)Strangely enough, the same chains that have operations in Asia or Europe typically do NOT have free access there!
A note on Wi-Fi in Europe: I've stayed in four different hotels in Krakow, Poland in the past 12 months, and the Wi-Fi was free and had good signal quality in all cases. I have been thinking that this was the European norm. Now you're telling me that this would not happen in France, The Netherlands, Denmark, etc.?
Well, my experiences are from two years ago and earlier, so things may have changed.
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