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> This was in the age when the price of a hotel room was directly correlated with the price of the WiFi service That's odd. I used to feel that the price of wi

> This was in the age when the price of a hotel room was directly correlated with the price of the WiFi service That's odd. I used to feel that the price of wifi in hotels was inversely correlated with the hotel room price.

gumby 3y ago
Strangely, in the US at least, the cheap hotels would have free or low cost WiFi while the upscale places charged an arm and a leg.
- nine_k 3y ago
  Not strangely; it's completely logical. By the same token, a bottle of sparkling water would cost you much more in an expensive restaurant. Those who live in upscale hotels and eat at expensive restaurants are usually much less price-sensitive.
- cpeterso 3y ago
  Price discrimination: people staying at expensive hotels can afford to pay for Wi-Fi or they're on a business trip and will just expense the cost.
- albert_e 3y ago
  this is probably because bigger hotels are more likely to be booked by business travellers and these expenses get lumped into reimbursements. smaller hotels need to compete for more discerning budget oriented travellers who will only pay charges seen as reasonable, or start avoiding hotels seen as fleecing.
  - ant6n 3y ago
    As a business Traveller for bigcorp, I wouldn‘t really know how to expense such an item, it seems at least a big hassle. We book hotels through our system, travel too, food is on a fixed budget. Taxi receipts I can include with the travel reimbursement form. Other stuff is a hassle. I think of there wasn’t free wifi, Id just tether of the phone.
    - owenmarshall 3y ago
      Huh, that’s surprising - when I traveled for bigcorps and littlecorps “internet access” always had its own category in whatever process we had, be it Concur or someone’s hand rolled Excel sheet. I haven’t travelled in years, but just checked my current software and it’s still there today.
- bboygravity 3y ago
  Yet, it causes "the pain of paying" and micro-transactions in general go directly against common sense and general marketing ideas of building a luxury/exclusive hassle-free feeling brand. Especially since the payment process at those upscale hotels often was/is seperate from the room-paying process and was a total hassle (making an account through some crappy GUI, entering credit card details manually, etc). It definitely felt super cheap and greedy to me when I stayed in those up-scale hotels for work and wanted to use wifi.
  - silasdavis 3y ago
    Yes I will never forget or forgive being forced submit my details to some Marriot bonvoy spam club in order to qualify for free WiFi in an expensive US hotel where I was staying for a conference. It was otherwise a manual daily payment via a broken portal of fifteen dollars. The cost of roaming mobile data in the US (from the UK, at the time) was completely absurd so they had me over a barrel for the hour or so connectivity I needed from the hotel per day to check in with work. They wouldn't/couldn't just add it to my room invoice either so I would have had to manually pay on a personal card, and expense each day. From memory the portal did not accept my card on the first try either. I'll take my boycott of them for this slight to my grave. Are mid-range businessy hotels really working with such slim margins that its worth alienating customers like this?
  - BeFlatXIII 3y ago
    > for work That’s the leading hypothesis: those hotels court business travelers who will have someone else foot the bill.
    - mbg721 3y ago
      I had heard the explanation at one point that pricey hotels were the first to adopt wi-fi systems and locked themselves into expensive long-term contracts, so they were still trying to recoup the costs even as the tech got cheaper and more widespread. I guess it's been long enough now that that wasn't the real reason.
      - 3y ago
- benbristow 3y ago
  In the UK it's the other way round. Our big two 'budget' (haha) hotel chains, Premier Inn and Travelodge both charge for barely usable Wi-Fi. The former offering an unlimited free service but restricted to about 500kbps and a paid 'ultimate' service which runs at about 10mbps. The latter giving you 30 mins free and then you have to pay, unless you're in one of their premium rooms where its included. Total racket supplied by Virgin WiFi for both. Thankfully don't often need it with better 4G/5G signal but sometimes the rooms can be Faraday cages. Most of the more posh hotels I've been to have free unlimited decent WiFi.
- chrismcb 3y ago
  It was a business thing. Business travelers works get there company to pay for the WiFi. So it was expensive. And it wasn't a US thing. I ran into the same issue in Europe.
- thayne 3y ago
  My theory is that it is a form of price discrimination. If you can afford to stay at a nicer hotel, then you are more likely to be able and willing to pay more for wifi as well. You can see it in other things too. For example, mid-range hotels often have "free" breakfast included, but higher end hotels charge you for breakfast. Room service prices scale with the price of a room.
  - tristor 3y ago
    It is a form of price discrimination, but it's actually more straightforward than that. These "nicer hotels" are primarily business hotels, rather than hotels targeted at personal travelers. Business hotels, at least in the US, take their guidance from the US Government in the form of the GSA. The US Federal government is one of the largest employers in the US, and most businesses limit their per diem rates for expenses to match GSA rates because these rates typically infer a tax advantage to the business. These rates are published annually by locality: https://www.gsa.gov/travel/plan-book/per-diem-rates https://www.gsa.gov/travel/plan-book/per-diem-rates This of course isn't always true, but it does provide a strong price anchor. Importantly, the GSA historically separated per-diem for the hotel stay, food and beverage expenses, and "add-on amenities", which included things like WiFi. This is a major factor for why hotels historically charged for WiFi at higher priced places targeted at businesses (e.g. may have an attached conference center or meeting spaces) vs hotels targeted at personal travelers.
jtokoph 3y ago
I remember it as the quality and speed of the connection being inversely proportional. You would get 50mb/s for free at a cheap motel, but pay $25/day for "Business Class" wifi that might hit 768kb/s at the Ritz Carlton at off peak hours.
- bombcar 3y ago
  The cheap motel would have a connection and a cheap Wi-Fi router, and you’d get the whole bandwidth (even today sometimes I find a fat nearly gigabit pipe in the middle of nowhere). The expensive larger hotel would have a fancy barely working system from Cisco that monitored and limited bandwidth. Sometime, however, there would be an Ethernet Jack under the table that would give you full 100mb/s.
2143 3y ago
Did you mean you say directly/inversely "proportioned" rather than "correlated"? (English is not my first language).
- colonwqbang 3y ago
  No, it's correct as written. "Proportional" is a very strong statement. It means that one variable is a linear function of another, i.e. y = kx. "The power dissipated in a wire is proportional to the current through the wire". "Correlation" can mean almost any kind of relationship where a change in one variable follows a change in another. "Smoking is correlated with lung cancer".
  - mananaysiempre 3y ago
    And "proportioned" (as opposed to "proportional") is not about a mathematical relationship at all, but about the proportions of somebody or something, as in the shape: a perfectly-proportioned body, a badly-proportioned room, a generously-proportioned seat; an accompanying adverb is usually (always?) required.
    - 2143 3y ago
      Aww, I originally meant to write "proportional" instead of "proportioned". My bad.

gumby 3y ago

Strangely, in the US at least, the cheap hotels would have free or low cost WiFi while the upscale places charged an arm and a leg.

nine_k 3y ago
Not strangely; it's completely logical. By the same token, a bottle of sparkling water would cost you much more in an expensive restaurant. Those who live in upscale hotels and eat at expensive restaurants are usually much less price-sensitive.
cpeterso 3y ago
Price discrimination: people staying at expensive hotels can afford to pay for Wi-Fi or they're on a business trip and will just expense the cost.
albert_e 3y ago
this is probably because bigger hotels are more likely to be booked by business travellers and these expenses get lumped into reimbursements. smaller hotels need to compete for more discerning budget oriented travellers who will only pay charges seen as reasonable, or start avoiding hotels seen as fleecing.
- ant6n 3y ago
  As a business Traveller for bigcorp, I wouldn‘t really know how to expense such an item, it seems at least a big hassle. We book hotels through our system, travel too, food is on a fixed budget. Taxi receipts I can include with the travel reimbursement form. Other stuff is a hassle. I think of there wasn’t free wifi, Id just tether of the phone.
  - owenmarshall 3y ago
    Huh, that’s surprising - when I traveled for bigcorps and littlecorps “internet access” always had its own category in whatever process we had, be it Concur or someone’s hand rolled Excel sheet. I haven’t travelled in years, but just checked my current software and it’s still there today.
bboygravity 3y ago
Yet, it causes "the pain of paying" and micro-transactions in general go directly against common sense and general marketing ideas of building a luxury/exclusive hassle-free feeling brand. Especially since the payment process at those upscale hotels often was/is seperate from the room-paying process and was a total hassle (making an account through some crappy GUI, entering credit card details manually, etc). It definitely felt super cheap and greedy to me when I stayed in those up-scale hotels for work and wanted to use wifi.
- silasdavis 3y ago
  Yes I will never forget or forgive being forced submit my details to some Marriot bonvoy spam club in order to qualify for free WiFi in an expensive US hotel where I was staying for a conference. It was otherwise a manual daily payment via a broken portal of fifteen dollars. The cost of roaming mobile data in the US (from the UK, at the time) was completely absurd so they had me over a barrel for the hour or so connectivity I needed from the hotel per day to check in with work. They wouldn't/couldn't just add it to my room invoice either so I would have had to manually pay on a personal card, and expense each day. From memory the portal did not accept my card on the first try either. I'll take my boycott of them for this slight to my grave. Are mid-range businessy hotels really working with such slim margins that its worth alienating customers like this?
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago
  > for work That’s the leading hypothesis: those hotels court business travelers who will have someone else foot the bill.
  - mbg721 3y ago
    I had heard the explanation at one point that pricey hotels were the first to adopt wi-fi systems and locked themselves into expensive long-term contracts, so they were still trying to recoup the costs even as the tech got cheaper and more widespread. I guess it's been long enough now that that wasn't the real reason.
    - 3y ago
benbristow 3y ago
In the UK it's the other way round. Our big two 'budget' (haha) hotel chains, Premier Inn and Travelodge both charge for barely usable Wi-Fi. The former offering an unlimited free service but restricted to about 500kbps and a paid 'ultimate' service which runs at about 10mbps. The latter giving you 30 mins free and then you have to pay, unless you're in one of their premium rooms where its included. Total racket supplied by Virgin WiFi for both. Thankfully don't often need it with better 4G/5G signal but sometimes the rooms can be Faraday cages. Most of the more posh hotels I've been to have free unlimited decent WiFi.
chrismcb 3y ago
It was a business thing. Business travelers works get there company to pay for the WiFi. So it was expensive. And it wasn't a US thing. I ran into the same issue in Europe.
thayne 3y ago
My theory is that it is a form of price discrimination. If you can afford to stay at a nicer hotel, then you are more likely to be able and willing to pay more for wifi as well. You can see it in other things too. For example, mid-range hotels often have "free" breakfast included, but higher end hotels charge you for breakfast. Room service prices scale with the price of a room.
- tristor 3y ago
  It is a form of price discrimination, but it's actually more straightforward than that. These "nicer hotels" are primarily business hotels, rather than hotels targeted at personal travelers. Business hotels, at least in the US, take their guidance from the US Government in the form of the GSA. The US Federal government is one of the largest employers in the US, and most businesses limit their per diem rates for expenses to match GSA rates because these rates typically infer a tax advantage to the business. These rates are published annually by locality: https://www.gsa.gov/travel/plan-book/per-diem-rates https://www.gsa.gov/travel/plan-book/per-diem-rates This of course isn't always true, but it does provide a strong price anchor. Importantly, the GSA historically separated per-diem for the hotel stay, food and beverage expenses, and "add-on amenities", which included things like WiFi. This is a major factor for why hotels historically charged for WiFi at higher priced places targeted at businesses (e.g. may have an attached conference center or meeting spaces) vs hotels targeted at personal travelers.

jtokoph 3y ago

I remember it as the quality and speed of the connection being inversely proportional. You would get 50mb/s for free at a cheap motel, but pay $25/day for "Business Class" wifi that might hit 768kb/s at the Ritz Carlton at off peak hours.

bombcar 3y ago
The cheap motel would have a connection and a cheap Wi-Fi router, and you’d get the whole bandwidth (even today sometimes I find a fat nearly gigabit pipe in the middle of nowhere). The expensive larger hotel would have a fancy barely working system from Cisco that monitored and limited bandwidth. Sometime, however, there would be an Ethernet Jack under the table that would give you full 100mb/s.

2143 3y ago

Did you mean you say directly/inversely "proportioned" rather than "correlated"? (English is not my first language).

colonwqbang 3y ago
No, it's correct as written. "Proportional" is a very strong statement. It means that one variable is a linear function of another, i.e. y = kx. "The power dissipated in a wire is proportional to the current through the wire". "Correlation" can mean almost any kind of relationship where a change in one variable follows a change in another. "Smoking is correlated with lung cancer".
- mananaysiempre 3y ago
  And "proportioned" (as opposed to "proportional") is not about a mathematical relationship at all, but about the proportions of somebody or something, as in the shape: a perfectly-proportioned body, a badly-proportioned room, a generously-proportioned seat; an accompanying adverb is usually (always?) required.
  - 2143 3y ago
    Aww, I originally meant to write "proportional" instead of "proportioned". My bad.