A bit of a rant I guess. Many people have had this rant before, now it’s my turn.
As I have been away for our wedding for the last two weeks I have had the annoying experience of not having a WiFi connection available at that time.
We are talking here about a US$300 per night hotel. Granted there is free cable Internet in our room, but I am buffled as to, why is it that I would need to pay to use the WiFi connection in the lobby of the hotel as a guest? It probably runs of the same Internet connection as the room, I am much more likely to be transferring larger files when in my room then in the lobby, so it can’t be a bandwidth problem.
Why do I need WiFi when I have a cable in the room? Good question and exactly what my new wife has been asking. Actually what she was really asking was why do I need the Internet at all when on holiday?
As I use an iPhone connected to O2 (a UK carrier) the datacharges are silly when traveling, the data roaming charge is about $9 (£6) per megabyte. Before I left the UK I measured that I used 50 megabytes per week of mobile data, which means that the two weeks here would cost $900 (£600), which in my oppinion is a bit excessive.
As to why I need WiFi, the answer is, to download all my rss feeds, so that I can read them offline on the beach.
Is there an app that lets me download the content to my computer and then sync to my phone?
Next reason a WiFi would have been very useful while here would have been to comunicate with our friends around the resourt. As we were here for the wedding, we had 50 people join us for the first week and even though the resourt is not huge keeping updated on what are people doing was not very efficient (or even reliable) via SMS messages.
What would have been very useful is a mini check-in/scheduling app, but that would have required WiFi too and it’s a topic for another post.
Bottom line is, there should be no charge for WiFi in hotels, it is annoying and can’t be that profitable, include it in the price of the room if need to!