Over the past few months I’ve developed the habit of going back to the same hotels on a regular basis where the service is great on the human and broadband level.
In Paris, my stays have been strictly at the Sofitel Bercy because the front desk, Concierge (Bertrand) and housekeepers all run the place so well. Every time I visit, its like coming home for me, and having stayed their now some 20+ nights in the last eight months, it really does feel like home. One of the reasons I love the property is that I can have my choice of wired and wireless Internet.
On the Working Anywhere Scale this hotel gets an A+
The wired behaves just like my Covad T1 at home. I plug in my Linksys Travel Router, open my browser and everything works. Truphone on my Nokia N95 makes it seem like I’m in the USA, my Nokia N800 lets me stream music and do other things, and of course the Mac works like always…Perfectly.
My second home away from home is the Sofitel Montpellier. Its like the bar “Cheers” where “everyone knows your name.” Well at least my name, and they treat me like a regular with always a warm welcome back. Everything as it should be. Almost. I was here three nights in April to run some tests for my upcoming wedding party and wanted to make sure the broadband was as it was the last time I was here, which was back in the fall. Everything was perfect. Wireless and wired were at my disposal, so you can imagine my surprise when the wired Internet (which the hotel has not disconnected) didn’t work.
Sure the wireless from Orange is very good, but it has some quirks, none the least of which is how it changes configurations on the routing almost every few hours, or how it makes using Microsoft Entourage a challenge, or how it likes to drop VPN connections at random, or how it at midnight or 1 pm depending of Daylight Savings Time, decides to drop you. But the wired services being unavailable were a surprise to me, as they were to the hotel’s staff and even their engineer. You see, for the second time now, I’ve found problems in hotel’s wired broadband networks. The last time was at the Los Angeles Renaissance where a router was misconfigured after a group had used the hotel and had their own broadband brought in to assure them of the kind of transport they needed.
The same has apparently happened, as Goodyear is having a convention and the engineer told me that there was something done to accommodate them by France Telecom, but the intention was to never disrupt the rest of the hotel.
To the hotel’s credit they are giving me free WiFi access, not that I need it, but my fiancé will, as I have the Boingo Global package, which gives me access to Orange with out any additional costs. But issues related to ports, proxys and protective services remain and the lack standards and consistency remains our biggest hurdle as a road warrior trying to always stay connected.
On the Working Anywhere scale this hotel receives a B this trip, but may return to A once the hotel loses the group from Goodyear.
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