To not want to pay for wifi

[Pastperfect]

Paying £220 a night for hotel and I'm expected to pay another £15 per night for wifi so I can MN surely that's taking the piss?!

Strange, when we stay at Premier Inn, which we regularly do, then it doesn't matter how many devices you have, you only pay the once (per 24 hours).

But here is the thing - it is never ever ever free.

Like the silly soaps, the bottle water, the free biscuits. None of them are free.

They are paid for in the rate or are extra. Budget hotels like people to feel they are getting "value" so bundle items in and take things out.. "we give you free wifi but charge for extra towels - so you get VALUE"

It aint free - the hotel has to pay for it (and it is usually v expensive for the hotel to have that kind of backhaul connection) they either absorb it in the rate or charge you for it. Different segments of hotel charge differently.

As for those who want it free - and think it should be - what on earth do you think they should do? Give out rooms for free? push guns in the faces of hotel owners who dare to pass on their costs to clients?

If you begrudge paying £10 or £20 for wifi stay in a chav-o-lodge. just check the mattress for bloodstains / semen / faeces /lice / ebola. Formule1 in France offers nothing and is really cheap - not even an ensuite loo - but it offers a bed for the night - everything is extra. Budget hotels have a different pricing model.

It's free in IBIS

oddcommentator, it may be taken into account in the price, but the point is that if it's free it's not time limited. At a lot of hotels you have a choice between paying £X for an hour or £Y for a day. If you need to keep logging on and off you have little choice but to pay for 24 hours even though self-evidently you won't be using it for 24 hours. If you actually just want to spend 10 minutes checking emails or flight times, you have to pay for a full hour.

And in fact, if you compare prices between similar hotels, you will find the room rate for those offering free wifi is almost invariably very similar to that for the hotels that charge for it.

Icimoi

I disagree with your conclusion. The model is aimed to get people to buy a 24 hour pass.

Room rate for travelodge is advertised at £29 versus a night at the mandarin oriental hyde park is £570 per night. Though i did notice that if you book a room at rack they are offering complimentary wifi for the duration of your stay. They normally charge a fortune!

The background is usually that a lot of the hotels started offering this a long time ago when wifi was neither as common or as cheap and therefore it was an expensive luxury. As an accepted part of business travel expense it is now just "there" i know that if i charge it to my account, finance just wave it through.

I have noticed also for a great many free offerings, you get issued a time stamped IP address that refreshes when you switch off so you have to reenter codes etc. They do this not to piss you off, but to manage bandwidth and discourage heavy use. A fibre braodband line offering a 100meg service is probably cheap but a 200 room hotel needs usually a 1gig fibre with no contention. This costs an awful lot of money - so the limited time thing is done to throttle bandwidth.

I travel lots for work - mostly Africa, US and Asia - I can count on one hand the number of hotels in which I have had to pay at point of service for wifi.

I accept that we always pay but frankly I'd be happier to have it added to the room cost and at least feel like I was getting a freebie, same as with the bottles of water, fancy toiletries and car parking. Especially when I've just handed over my personal credit card for a personal stay.

OP isn't staying in a chav-o-lodge. She's staying in a posh place. That's why it's galling. I'd expect some nice freebies in the basic room rate at Posh-R-Us Hotel. And Wifi is pretty cheap to provide, anyway.

I'm trying to think of the last time I stayed somewhere that didn't offer at least a spell of free wifi. Even the airports give you an hour or so free nowadays.