Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Time to add another item to the list of ‘Things Australia is Behind On’, and this time it’s free Wi-Fi provision in hotels. In fact, Australia is so behind on this one, that other countries have gone full-circle, first providing free Wi-Fi and now moving on to charging for it again.
According to a recent report by US industry website HotelChatter, 64% of hotels in the US now offer free Wi-Fi. While obviously there are some Australian hotels that provide free internet access, there are many more that charge upwards of $25 per day – a fee that doesn’t even guarantee fast connection speeds.
The issue of free Wi-Fi in hotels recently gained some media attention when Tourism Australia asked Australian hotels to provide free Wi-Fi access across the board. This wasn’t an entirely altruistic move on the part of Tourism Australia. Their thinking was, if all Australian hotels were to provide free Wi-Fi, they could use that as a springboard to market Australia as a destination of the future. Or at least, the present.
Which has to be better than Australia’s current reputation for Wi-Fi provision. Australian Tourism Export Council managing director Felicia Mariani said, “It’s an issue that many of our international visitors are appalled by. The one thing we hear about time and time again, particularly from tourists from Asia and the USA, is the cost of Wi-Fi in our hotels.”
In a recent survey, booking website Hotels.com interviewed more than 8,600 people across 28 countries, and found that two-thirds picked free Wi-Fi as the facility they wished to become standard in all hotels. The survey also found that just 11% were willing to pay for Wi-Fi during their stay. Perhaps one of the strangest aspects of hotel Wi-Fi is that many cheaper hotels provide Wi-Fi for free, while more expensive hotels charge a fee.
Editor of Australian Business Traveller, David Flynn, said, “In an age when almost every backpacker hostel offers free Wi-Fi, it’s commercial arrogance for a top-end hotel to slug guests extra to use the internet.” In Sydney, the Park Hyatt charges $29 per device per day, while Sydney Harbour YHA charges $4 per day. In Melbourne, the Crown Metropole charges $25 per day for 1MB speed and $30 per day for 2MB speed, while Base Backpackers charges $4 per day. It’s a similar story across Australia.
“Ironically, the main argument hotels trot out against free internet access is that unlike a decade ago, today almost everybody is online,” Flynn said. Over in the US, hotels grasped the fact that guests wanted free Wi-Fi long ago, as prospective travellers voted with their feet, choosing to stay in hotels that offered free Wi-Fi over hotels that didn’t. This, in turn, encouraged travellers to bring their own entertainment, using laptops and tablets to stream media, instead of using hotel pay-per-view.
James Lingle of Highlands Ranch, Colorado, said, “If you look back, typically the first thing a guest would do when they walked into the door of a hotel room would be to turn on the TV. Now people bring their entertainment with them, [using] memberships like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu Plus.”
Some hotels have identified a way to turn a profit on this trend. Director of guest technology for Marriott International, C. Scott Hansen, said Marriott will increase connectivity within its hotels over the next few years. The cost of which, “would be offset by guests’ purchases of internet access, commissions paid by services like Netflix for signing up new members and advertising revenue from companies that could use the TV or guest’s laptop or tablet screen for messages,” he said.
If that’s the direction US hotels are heading, perhaps Australia should just skip free Wi-Fi, and let other countries swing back towards chargeable internet again. At least then Australia will be in the midst of a trend, instead of behind it.
The post Free Wi-Fi in Australian hotels? Maybe..never. appeared first on Quid.
