In European hotels there is a big surprise at how much a days worth of Internet costs. This amounts to gouging a captive audience and “Social Democracy Europe” should find it unacceptable, but it’s been happening for well over a decade.
In the states Wifi access in hotels, in my experience, is between $7 and $12 for the day and in a lot of cases it’s free, a significant difference to Europe. Especially in the San Francisco bay area, if Internet isn’t free in the room then the hotel takes a hit in their core business. It should be obvious what is important to the business traveller.
The issues of Internet in European hotels don’t stop with the charges. Most of the time the connection is hobbled in a way to make it unusable. More often than not there is some packet handling done by the internet provider that breaks VPN connections, therefore the reason I wanted the Internet in the first place is rendered useless. Secondary to this but just as important is the fact that VPN-like technologies are also used in email clients (SSL for example) the these are also often broken. Yet another reason that the very expensive Internet connection is useless.
Where are the consumer watchdogs that Europe is so proud of?
Since these VPN and email issues have surfaced relatively recently (in the last 2 years), I first thought it was an issue with my laptop or configuration but after polling various people I see that these issues are widespread. This is further corroborated by seeing upset customers at checkout time in various hotels being charged €27 for an internet connection that didn’t work properly.
Some hotels have the gall to use this packet handling as a way to upsell the end-user with an option for “full VPN access” for a premium. If I get this right, I purchase a service that doesn’t work properly and if I want to work properly then I must pay an extra fee. Where are the consumer watchdogs that Europe is so proud of?
At least one hotel chain, Radisson, offers free WiFi to their guests and it has prompted me to look at a Radisson hotel before any others on the list. If they have a free room and the rate is reasonable then I’ll stay there without hesitation.
