How reliable?
How speedy?
I’ve never used one but am considering doing some traveling while working remotely.
Please share your experiences.
They vary widely. Some are great, some are horrible. Most are adequate.
Secure is what I worry about. Make sure that they have some sort of WPA security enabled.
It works mostly, but don’t expect 100% reliability and high throughput. There could be an evening where the Wi-Fi won’t work at the Days Inn off the Interstate in Kawamusa Falls. If traveling in-country, you may be able to use tethering on your cell phone as a backup.
Most low- and mid-grade hotels offer Wi-Fi for free, but several high-end hotels still charge for it.
Almost always adequate for surfing the web and reading email. Sometimes adequate for streaming youtube, netflix, pandora. Almost never adequate to play World of Warcraft.
The usual issue is bandwidth - it seems most hotels will get a mid-range connection from the local cable company then split that among all the guests in the hotel. Since I work in IT, when I travel for conferences, the hotel internet is usually useless for anything once all of the attendees arrive and try to do their high-bandwidth activities on it.
Security can be problem, or connecting to “rogue” WAPs, but not moreso than any other public location, really.
As others have said there’s quite a bit of variance, and some are really shitty and thus unreliable if you need it for work. Your best bet would be to check out any and all online reviews you can find that mention the Wi-Fi. Of course, people are probably more likely to mention it if they had a bad experience with it than otherwise, so if you can’t find much/any mention of it then it’s probably decent enough (assuming that hotel does in fact have it, which you’d also want to check :)).
In my experience, at many hotels (mid-level, Holiday Inn Express-types), between the hours of 8pm and 1am the speed slows to almost being unusable. So if you’re relying on it for work purposes (as I often was), don’t count on getting much done during that time.
I’m surprised at the way some supposedly business-oriented hotels in Europe tend to stick on fiddly extra charges for Wifi, which can often become unavailable outside the reception area, while cheapo room-only places can often have much better wifi without any extra charges. But there can be a lot of variation, and a lot depends on whether everybody’s trying to watch online TV at the same time.
From what I’ve read, the idea is that the guests at a business-oriented hotel can and do expense the WiFi charge while those who stay at the cheapo hotels are paying out of pocket and cannot. (Also, they’re cheapskates who won’t pay an extra charge.) Some hotel chains waive the WiFi fee if you join their customer loyalty program.
And I read somewhere that hotels are considering two tiers of service; a free lower level of service good enough for checking mail and a higher level (that’s not free) that’s fast enough to stream Netflix or other video content.
They vary widely. Sheraton Hotel downtown Columbus, Ohio? Useless, Z Hotels in Liverpool and London? Outstanding. Luxor Las Vegas? Useless. Premier Inn Manchester UK? Ok for web access and email.
I echo this. You can pay a lot of money for a top end hotel and high speed internet is available. It may be available but they also charge for it. The Royal Garden in London- about $500 a night- does this.
Yup, that’s me.
But it is noticeable, on a trip I do most years, that the more upmarket (lots of marble in the foyer) business hotel in Munich makes you buy a 24-hour access for 5euro, and it really only works by the reception desk, whereas the family hotel we go on to in an Austrian village has wifi for free, working in most parts of the hotel. As does the basic B&B place I usually stay at in Paris.
If the posher hotels are working on the theory that it’ll all be charged to expenses anyway, why don’t they just roll it up in the room rate?
Because the room rate is what is used by the booking program to determine recommended hotels. Add ons and extras just get handled by expense reports.
Okay.
I think I have asked the wrong question.
I’ll start another thread about how to find an acceptable connections in a strange city.
Thank you for your responses.
For what it’s worth, the thing that bugs me is when the connection times out on me and I have to reconnect every couple of hours. I found out that (for the hotel I always stay at in NYC, anyway) if I call the tech support number on the card with the password they can make it so I stay connected until the end of the stay.
Most hotel rooms still have Ethernet ports, too. I like to travel with an Airport Express and make my own Wifi network, as it tends to be reliable and faster, and I don’t have to configure Wifi on any of my devices. And if your hotel limits Wifi to only two or three devices, the router, strictly speaking, is only one device.