Why is it that you can stay at the $75 a night Quality Inn off the interstate and you get free wireless high speed internet, but spend the night in the $250 a night Newark Airport Marriott and it costs you $9.95 (plus applicable taxes) a day?
The previous two nights were spent in a New Britain, CT extended stay hotel that caters to business folks and it cost me $4.95 a day for high speed web access. Yet the local Motel 8 was giving it away.
Not only is is fast and free at the national chain places, I have never had an issue hooking up. Tonight at the Marriott I successfully managed to log in, agree to the conditions, check yes to the fee and get to view one page of the Weather Channel web site for losing connectivity. I rebooted, I swapped out for my cat5 cable and rebooted again with no luck. I ended up having to call the 1-800 number to get a help desk person. A five minute wait and we did a couple of things, including disabling the wireless (remind me to turn that back on later huh) and disabling the wired NIC and re-enabling it so I could get back on line.
That time I managed to stay connected for about 2 minutes before being dumped off. Back to the 1-800 number. This time we ran over a few other things and the CSR tried a couple of resets on her end. I am automatically getting an IP address, but I’m not getting a DNS address. The CSR said she would report this up the food chain and see if they could figure out what the problem is, but for now we left it alone as I’m back online. I just don’t have a high confidence that I’ll stay connected.
Internet service charges at hotels is just very low cost high profit income. They generally have business travelers and know that they have a high demand for internet service and can get away with the high fees. The lower-end chains give it away as a perk to entice business travelers to choose them over the nicer chains. If the company is paying, I’m staying at the nicer hotel and letting them also pay for internet service.
That was one of those questions that once I asked, I started thinking about it and later came your conclusion as well. Those hotels catered to business travelers and knew that they would sign up no matter what the cost, because it would go right on the expense account and the company wouldn’t balk at paying it.