LukeSnedden.com

Our travels have revealed that there are two types of hotel;

• Hotels that provide Free Wi-fi, but don’t offer much else.
• Hotels that are well appointed, great places to stay that provide Wi-fi for a ridiculously inflated price!

Only one of the Hotels (it was really a motel) provided free Internet (it was cable based, but very slow broadband) and was not a great place to stay, it was stuck in the 70’s with vinyl everywhere and very little natural light. It reminded me of my first job, the office was a concrete bunker under a Casino with fluorescent lighting everywhere.

The Free Wi-fi did make the place bearable!!

The connection was not without its problems, it did have a tendency to drop out every four or five minutes which necessitated flicking the power off the router and back on again.  But hey is was free, I’m not complaining.

The town we were in did seem to have a culture of free Wi-fi in all their hotels. The signs were obvious like the one above.

So for three weeks we were able to take advantage of the free Wi-fi. I’m sure it did not cost the hotel too much, they had a pretty clear abuse policy:

“Don’t download movies, if your usage is abusive you will be charged 70c per MB”.

In other words don’t be stupid and you won’t get charged. It was a nice step away from the draconian data limits that normally apply. 1 Gig per session? plah-ease.

Normally we are faced with wifi that costs.

$19.95 per day seems to be the norm. Normally by the time I need to splash out on this exorbitant daily cost I need to use more than this and I hit the limit at about midday. Sucks really.

I do have a prepaid Internet stick from Telstra which offers its own unique challenges. Telstra offer good value for money with decent speed and low costs. For 5 gig we pay $80, it lasts about a month before we need to recharge. The cost halves by going on a plan, but since we don’t have a permanent address Telstra won’t allow us to do this.

Now back to the two types of hotels, the ones that don’t provide free wifi have provided the nicest overall accommodation some up to 4.5 star, real flash! Why can they go that little bit further and provide free wifi? Surely the cost would be a fraction of our room rate? As most of their guests are business travellers they will remember the free wifi above most other services provided.

So far none of the hotels have consistently provided an overall package which would prove to be exemplary, lots have concentrated on provideing modern clean rooms with full cable TV, flat screens, and facilities that include top of the line gyms but always fall down on the provision of a business basic, Internet facilities.

So I’ll beat the well beaten drum:

Come on Hoteliers, Get us some free Wi-fi, add the average cost into the room rate no one will notice!!