Remember the bad old days, when staying in a hotel meant being forced to use extravagantly priced hotel telephone services? In one NYC hotel I visited, simply picking up the phone to dial an outside line — whether the call connected or not — cost $1.50. Completed local calls cost an additional $1.50 per minute; long distance calls were a whopping $6.00 per minute.
Now that most of us carry cell phones with nationwide or international calling plans, hotels are losing all that revenue. Unfortunately, they’ve found a way to make it up — with outrageously priced internet access fees.
Thanks to Clyde’s innate ability to twist complex systems to his advantage, we constantly get good deals on plane tickets and hotels. (It’s not unusual for him to snag us a four-star hotel for a quarter of its published price.) But upon arrival, we’re frequently greeted with prohibitively high ‘net access fees.
In London, for example, our hotel wanted $16.00 for an hour or $30.00 per day. $30.00 per day? That’s more than I pay for a month of high-speed access at home! And — worse — these connections (the one or two times we purchased them in desperation) were slow, slow, slow.
It’s robbery, and I won’t put up with it any more. Instead of paying our Edinburgh hotel $30.00 for one day of access, we opted to buy a Boingo account — an all-you-can-eat plan for $24.95 a month — instead. And while the hotel did slap us with a “premium service” fee of twelve cents per minute — grrr — we came out well ahead of the game as a result.
Hotels have internet access already, as part of their corporate infrastructure. Building out a wireless network costs them very, very little — it’s not like they have to wire the rooms. Simply put: these days, hotels should be supplying wireless internet access as automatically as they provide towels and sheets. And, from now on, when I stay somewhere demanding unreasonable fees for what should be free to guests, I’m going to complain long and loud about it.
You should, too.
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