Bye-Bye Free Wi-Fi When In Hotels

I'm going to out on a limb and say that hotels, over time simply can't give away Wi-Fi, unless the raise room rates. I say this because as USA Today points out, there's an "insatiable" demand for connectivity while traveling, and hotels can't keep treating it like air. I say this because the cost of maintaining a proper connectivity experience is not free to the hotel.

Routers, access points, authentication services, network connectivity and bandwidth all are not free. Nor are hotels seeing any revenue from the customer who now uses a cell phone to make calls, while still maintaining an in room phone system. Hotels are also losing revenue from the in room movie crowd, which other than from porn, will keep seeing a steady decline from defections to iTunes, HBO, Disney, Netflix, Hulu and all the cable company apps that let travelers tune in from afar.

Hotels would be smart to sell daily, monthly and annual passes to guests to "rent" an Apple TV or similar box on a daily basis for half the price of a first run movie so traveler can connect to the big screen in the room, using Wi-FI, but here again, the network has to be able to support the amount of traffic traversing the on premise network, as well the outside Internet.

So here's the business idea hoteliers. Charge $20.00 a day, with an in-room box. Upgrade your connectivity, cut out the OnDemand and other in-room guest experience companies, and let your guests do what they want to do, which the already are, but make more money, not less off of them.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Comments

[bradtem.myopenid.com]

Wow, I'm the opposite. When the hotel tells me there is a charge for wifi, I ask, "and how much is the electricity? What's the water fee?"

Yes, I expect good electricity, good water, good sheets etc. from my hotel, and yes, that's all included in the rate. But $20? Any ISP is able to sell decent connectivity to all the houses in town for a price that's around $1 to $2 per day per house. And many of the people in the houses are watching movies, too. And they make a reasonable profit at that price.

Now $2 per day is not enough to charge a special fee for, it makes more sense to consider it part of the price of the room. And that way you can get rid of those annoying wifi login screens too which screw up all your applications.

[Robert Stevens]

This kind of sounds like an excuse to sell hotels Metro ethernet services rather than a simple Comcast or fios connection. Most of the hotels that I work with currently are using Comcast or fios type pipes very few are on very robust networks such as metro ethernet. I would have to say that most of their hard costs are built into your hotel room stay