How much free Wi-Fi is enough?
Access to free Wi-Fi is non-negotiable for travellers these days, but hoteliers constantly grapple with the question of how much is enough.
At the recent Hotel Investment Africa Conference (HICA) Robert Hodson, GM at a Legacy Hotels and Resorts’ Da Vinci Hotel asked exactly this question, saying: “We gave 350MB and increased it to 1G, but it is still not enough.”
Danny Bryer, director of sales, marketing and revenue for Protea Hotels told Moneyweb: “Some measure of free Wi-Fi is a non-negotiable for travellers and numerous international studies have shown that it’s the biggest accommodation decision factor for executives. If a hotel isn’t prepared to offer free Wi-Fi, corporate travellers will quite simply stay elsewhere.”
Protea Hotels and African Pride Hotels offer up to 500MB of free Wi-Fi daily in all its hotels across the continent.
“Conferencing hotels such as African Pride Crystal Towers Hotel & Spa are putting in high speed lines as well to make it easier for not only their guests but also their delegates to do business faster and more efficiently. More and more hotels are installing tablets into their business centres as well”, Bryer said.
Franco Jordaan, GM of the Court Classique hotel in Pretoria that was the first to offer free Wi-Fi in the capital city, said while this, together with free parking was a unique selling point seven to eight years ago, free Wi-Fi is now simply a basic requirement.
It is however a challenge for a hotel to provide a quality service in this regards, he said. “We have just upgraded out ADSL line with our service provider to 10Mbps, just to find out that Telkom can only provide 5Mbps. The service provider merely shifts the blame to Telkom.
The existing line is furthermore so unstable that its real capacity is sometimes as low as 1Mbps, Jordaan said. A further problem is that uploading speed is often slower than down downloading speed. Guests’s usage patterns have changed and uploading is becoming increasingly dominant with guests wanting to upload pictures to facebook for example.
“We have been offering free Wi-Fi for many years. Service providers cannot guarantee the quality of service. They blame each other and often leave the hotel with a red face.”
He said hotels initially saw Wi-Fi as an additional revenue stream. This model has changed with most hotels providing guests with giving a limited amount free of charge.
Some hotels only provide free Wi-Fi in their restaurants in an effort to drive guests there and at least earn something from the food and drinks they consume as they sit and work, Jordaan says.
The increased use of technology and changes in the way it is utilised also influences the physical lay-out of hotels, he said. “Business centres are not really necessary anymore.”
Bryer said the question of how much free W-Fi should be offered to guests is one that forms part of the company’s on-going internal discussion and planning around how the hospitality industry as a whole needs to respond to a world that is constantly being changed by technology. “Free Wi-Fi for guests is simply one component of a much larger picture that even talks to the changes that technology has brought about in hotel room design, which now includes several more plug points because most travellers have more than one electronic device to charge.”
Research by the commercial Wi-Fi network iPass confirms this, as illustrated by the following info graphic:
Connected traveler
Source: Moneyweb
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