B-Travel – 3PM a new low in hotel internet fees
So there are 2 things I think are really horrible about hotels – room service fees (food quality too) and Internet fees. I’ve seen some really crazy fees for both, but internet fees are just illogical. I paid ₤22,00 once for a day and a couple of weeks ago, I paid for €88 for 5 days. I paid for five days because I could get 2 devices and share the connection.
So types of things I have seen in the marketplace:
Swisscom: multiple plans, but the most interesting was a time AND bandwidth limited account with overage fee (what?!?!), as i noted above I opted for the multi-day and multiple device plan
Four Seasons: I don’t remember the location but it was like $24.95 or almost the 50% of my monthly bandwidth fees from my cable provider.
t-Mobile: I like t-mobile’s hotspots, but I normally only use a connection for 2-3 hours, since its typically a airport stop. I have been lucky enough to stay at a hotel which had t-Mobile, but only like twice. In that case it was well worth the $9.99 fee for the day pass.
But the winner on weird configurations for the week was Wayport, a session until 3PM. The session is static and I only got like 1 hour in my session for like $9.99, apparently these folks cannot program the logic to manage dynamic sessions or maybe they are just greedy. The art of effectively pricing a captive audience.
Optimistic Prediction: Cell phone wireless cards will more or less obsolete paid wireless connections just like pay phones. I don’t remember the last time I used a pay phone and I long for the day I can’t remember typing in my credit card number for an abusive rate to rent a commodity pipe from a hotel. Although, the real irony is that low end hotels offer FREE wireless – why is that?
Technorati Tags: Swisscom, Four Seasons, t-Mobile, Wayport
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