Luxury hotels loosening the Wi-Fi reins

Thursday, May 5th, 2011 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor

In today’s WSJ, Andrea Petersen, in Luxury Hotels Free Up Wi-Fi,discusses how luxury hotels are finally offering free Wi-Fi, starting with their loyalty program members.

The frustrating dilemma being that cheap hotels give free Wi-Fi, and luxury hotels do not. Yet, business travelers expect Wi-Fi.

In our upcoming Mobile Workforce Report, hotels remain the most popular place to log into for business travelers. They spend an average of 84 minutes per session, showing that they are doing more than sending a few emails. In this upcoming report, we will share with you the mobile workers’ willingness to pay for a faster connection speed (they already expect the Wi-Fi) and that they now connect more than one device to Wi-Fi. It’s not just a laptop anymore!

As mentioned in a previous blog post, Good Wi-Fi affects future hotel choice by business travelers, our Hospitality Survey, showed that

• 95 percent of business travelers care if there is Wi-Fi or a wired connection in a hotel
• Overall, 51 percent of mobile employees prefer to book at hotels with Wi-Fi and 14 percent find Ethernet acceptable, while another 24.4 percent assume it is available.
• More than half of mobile employees tell the front desk if there is a problem with their Wi-Fi. 37 percent will choose or avoid that hotel in the future, and another 17 percent will avoid or seek out the entire hotel chain based on a negative or positive experience.

This followed the JD Powers survey, as reported by Hotels.com in “Hotel guests put Wi-Fi at top of amenity list”, of the 2010 North America Hotel Guest Satisfaction Index Study showing that hotel guests indicate that wireless Internet access is their #1 Most Important Amenity in all but one hotel segment.

 

 

Tags: hospitality