I stayed at a Marriott hotel recently while doing business with a client. The hotel was clean, the service was OK and the breakfast was very good. But…..the good folk at Marriott saw fit to charge me £15 ($23.75) for a day’s worth of internet access. That’s as much as I pay my provider back at the ranch for a whole month. Or to put it another way, if I paid the Marriott equivalent at home, my internet access would cost me £450 ($700) a month!
I guess that now folks don’t use hotel phones anymore (and at £2 to dial a freephone number can you blame them?), the hotel needs to find another way to rip off its guests.
What do you think? Am I being unreasonable to gripe about this or in this increasingly connected world, should hotels be adding value to the guest experience by making internet access freely available?
Iphone>Settings>Enable personal hotspot>Job done 🙂
Absolutely, you’re justified. Just make sure they know why you will no longer be giving them your business, or anybody you talk with.
I learned many years ago that free internet access is a requirement for ANY hotel I stay at, no matter what price range.
Carl
It’s a tricky one this. I can see both sides. Its value pricing and probably an attempt at managing demand.
On the one hand as an individual, it’s expensive and, as you say, paying per day what one would pay per month domestically is egregiously expensive. However, a hotel is not a home, it’s a very different market. Commodities have a different value depending on where and when you choose to consume them.
Was the price clear when you attached to the network?
The root cause here is actually mobile roaming charges. As a matter of stated policy, I ask our people when travelling abroad to pay for and use hotel wifi instead of using their mobiles for data and calls over Skype (which is of course just data). A single half hour mobile call when roaming can easily be £30. A £15 data charge in that context makes sense. If any significant proportion of the guests are from overseas, £15 is extremely cheap. The hotel knows it.
They are probably also trying to choke demand a little also as a hotel full of people watching The Killing on IPlauer in their rooms would require the entire bandwidth we had as a nation ten years ago.
In the end it sticks in your throat though. as the cost to the hotel of your wifi access and use was close to zero. Yesterday I was in tesco where wifi is free. I greedily attached to this free resource only to realise that the cheese counter was no place for subtitled Danish mayhem. I had no crucial need, so “free” was the right price.
As for roaming charges, now they are utterly wrong and an extreme example of value pricing, again aimed at business people but creating a price structure that makes no sense to individuals.
While the EU are finally clamping down (a case study in the power of lobbyists and cosy relationships) my trips to India and the USA will still attract call rates of well over £1 per minute. A few years ago, when in India a lot I bought a simple Nokia phone and prepay bundle for $35. It paid for itself in the first 45 mins.
Overall, as mobile roaming charges fall, so will hotel wifi charges.
I am now having a moment of grumpy nostalgia for my old 6310, battery life of a week, predictive text that meant I could type at 35 wpm and software that could do cell handovers properly so you could bray annoyingly at someone while on a train without having to call back repeatedly. My iPhone has a battery life of less than a day and drops all calls just outside Waterloo, though i can admire Sarah Lund’s chunky jumper on it from almost anywhere on the planet.
I agree – it’s a total rip off. I complained to the Hilton in Bradford for doing exactly the same thing. Just got back from a free weekend (using airline miles) from the Grand Hotel in Paris. Very grand and thank goodness we weren’t paying. Internet prices were exorbitant and it was cheaper to do O2 roaming than pay for the hotel service. I hate being ripped off.
Thanks for the replies folks:
@Rob – might work for some people though not ideal if you need to do anything other than light work/browsing/scrabble etc
@Carl – lovely to have your agreement sir
@Anthony – what a tale, have you any pics of the jumper? As you say there are two sides to every tale and doubtless the cost to us customers will fall. I’ve never been a fan of the ‘walking slowly backwards’ pricing technique that companies deploy in situations like this, I prefer it when the company sees the bigger picture and wraps everything up into a more valuable package for me, you, everyone.
@Sarah – bonjour et oui, a total rip!
If, like me, you were wondering about Sara Lund’s chunky jumper (see Tony A’s comment), then wonder no longer:
http://www.sarahlundsweater.com/
🙂