Now it’s not like me to rant. I’ve spent a lot of time training my brain to see the glass half full. Often I think us Brits love to hone in on the negative instead of seeing the positive glory of the other 95% of whatever it is we're critiquing.
But...........!
What the hell is going on with hotels and internet access!!??
Now I travel a lot. I just counted my North American stamps in my passport and at the end of this month I’ll be making my 30th trip there in past four and a half years.
I’ve just got back from covering the Travel Convention 2009 in Barcelona, and will no doubt have a few more EU trips over the next few months as they arise.
My question is: Where do hotels get off charging such exorbitant prices for shoddy bandwidth and why don’t they provide decent, reasonably priced access at conferences where they are making a ton of cash from the conference delegates and just need to flick a switch to make everyone happy?
To break it down, in-room access needs to change. I’m not saying make it free (or maybe I am) but I was charged $17 per DAY in a hotels in NY last month. We were working on covering AdWeek 2009 and there were a lot of videos we had to preview and write posts about. We couldn’t see any of the videos. I called the hotels internet support team and was told, “we don’t give our guests adequate bandwidth to watch video, just enough to do regular stuff on the web!”
How 1980’s?!!! The last time I looked video was one of the fastest growing content areas on the web, so how is that not regular!?
The hotel I was in in Barcelona said the wi-fi was free in the lobby but if I wanted to work in my room I had to pay for it!
The prices are ridiculous. A quick scan of BB prices in the UK show for about a tenner a month you can get 20MB speeds, and some with unlimited downloads. So why are hotels still trying to fleece us?
Downstairs in the conference rooms, at a lot of events for some reason the main hall won’t have access. “Oh we didn’t pay for that,” say the conference organisers, “the hotel wanted to charge us extra so we just took it in the foyer and speaker room!”
That’s a double-whammy there because I and hundreds of others like to work, blog and tweet live from conferences and if we don’t have access it reflects badly on the hotel and the conference. You might have a dozen or so people there who can be promoting your event for you, but you're tying one hand behind their back from the off!
I’d love to know why there is this disparity between what the rest of the world expects and what hotels and conference centres are willing to deliver. Is it the hotels trying to make some extra cash? Or are they being fleeced by who every provides them with their internet pipe?
Answers on a postcard as that’ll probably be faster!
