The GQ thread about looking for the Versus network on a hotel tv had me thinking about tv stations which I watch, but I don’t see on hotel tvs.
Verus, outside of the NHL and the Tour de France doesn’t show too much of interest so I can see why that station isn’t picked up.
I don’t often see CNBC. This surprises me as I’d figure business travelers would like it. However, their programming at night is pretty useless and this may be the reason. CNN and Fox News are almost always included and I often see CNN Headline News as well.
While ESPN is always there, ESPN 2 is only in about half the hotels I’ve been to recently. I often notice the local Fox Sports affiliate is missing.
Usually HBO is the premium channel. I haven’t had any premium channels at home for years, so I"m not sure if one premium channel is better than another.
There’s usually two or three channels aimed at kids. Usually some combination of Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and Disney channel. I’ve never seen Boomerang which I watch (as an adult) some times.
Of course, extended stay hotels often have a 30-40 channel lineup. Makes sense since people are staying at the hotel longer and want more variety.
Any of your favorites missing when you stay at hotels?
I often stay in hotels when I’m participating in a high performance driving event, and it’s often dismaying to find that they don’t have the Speed channel, on which I might be able to catch some coverage of one of the weekend’s Formula One races, or Versus, which now covers Indy Racing. (I don’t watch NASCAR.)
Also, IME virtually all hotel cable systems have CNN, and if there is any other news channel, it will probably be Fox News. If anything’s missing, it will be MSNBC.
I’m most annoyed when they don’t have Comedy Central.
I’ve worked with/at a number of hotels, primarily in Georgia, north Florida, and South Carolina, if that makes a difference. Without exception, though, the 30+ hotels that I’m intimately familiar with don’t have a “hotel cable system,” per se. They all have the equivalent of “Expanded Basic Cable,” as Comcast terms it, or something similar. Around here, anyway, hotels don’t get to tailor a cable system for their clientele.
As for HBO, many hotel chains are offered rebates or discounts from HBO, and most franchises are required to carry one premium channel. Do the math.
Two years ago I stayed at the former Holiday Inn on the Hill in Washington, DC. They didn’t carry WRC-TV (NBC) on their system. I thought there was something wrong with my TV, but the front desk confirmed it.
I’ve stayed at a lot of hotels in my time, but I believe that’s the only one I’ve ever seen that offered TV at all, but not a local station that was a major network affiliate.
All hotels have the Weather Channel. Few have the local “Weather on the 8s” – just the generic one for the entire country. Which seems pretty pointless – if you want the weather, you want the local weather.
This probably means they’re getting a satellite feed as opposed to the local cable. I get a generic Local on the 8s with Dish Network. (Fortunately, I have an Internet connection and a CD player that gets NOAA weather radio.)
I’ve worked for a few hotel ownership companies and usually it’s easier for the hotels to get dishes rather than cable, unless they are in a very rural area.
Then the hotel TV systems have only so many channels. The Pay per view TV is usually carried by a dish so it makes it very easy to just piggyback on that dish or put up another one next to it.
Various franchises and ownership groups have nationwide contracts so they have to carry certain channels to stay with that franchise. For instance when I worked for Starwood we had certain channels (ESPN, for example) that Starwood paid for so it made no sense NOT to carry it. It’s paid for so why not.)
But a lot of older hotels, like the one I worked in, were in Chicago so the buildings around it made dishes hard to put in. You could put up a dish but other building blocked a decent signal. So you got cable too.
Then like at the hotel I last worked at, they hotel TV system only had 25 channel period. So even though we had cable, we could only put 25 max on the hotel system. Of course you have to carry FOX, ABC, NBC, PBS, CBS, and the CW (especially in Chicago where it’s WGN). Then you had the ESPN and other required channels as required by ownership contracts). Then you had to reserve one channel for the events schedule. Then we had to reserve three channels for in-house groups (no one ever used them though). So after that it was up to each hotel to decide how to fill up the remaining ones.
It was funny 'cause we had the Comedy Channel soley because our GM loved it and he would watch it in his office. So a lot of channels are on hotel TV system, simply because someone in power like a GM wants it
Hotels and motels in the United States are spending big bucks replacing old analog CRT television sets with large wide-screen digital LCD sets. However, I never stayed in a place that actually aired an HDTV signal on those sets; it’s just a crappy 4:3 NTSC analog signal, which looks terrible on a hotel LCD set that resets itself to 16:9 every time you turn it on. Why are hotels spending money on HDTV sets but feeding them with crappy analog signals?
Just like expensive business hotels make their guests pay for wireless Internet access, I noticed that their television systems also carry far fewer channels than budget and mid-end hotels. ** Why do expensive hotels carry fewer television channels than cheap hotels?**
My guess is that those properties are used mostly by business travelers and convention attendees. They’re not as likely to have kids with them and are likely to be on a busier schedule. A hotel with most of their rooms filled with a one adult occupant can skimp on the tv a bit since they’d rather you spend money at the hotel bar/restaurant.
This is again, just my observation: The more “high-end” the hotel, the more like one is to be charged for each and every service provided. For example, I’ve worked in the Savannah, Georgia market with three Hilton brand hotels - Hampton Inn (catering to leisure/family travelers,) Hilton Garden Inn (catering to business travelers,) and Hilton’s top end flagship hotel. At the flagship Hilton, there were additional charges for use of the business center, breakfast, parking, etc. At Hilton Garden, parking and business center were free, but breakfast was an extra fee. At Hampton Inn (the lowest-end of the Hilton brands,) all were free. None of it necessarily makes sense to the average traveler, but the business model has worked for years.
As for TV, though, all three of these hotels that I’m familiar with had exactly the same channel lineup. Two of them, however, had PPV movies - Hilton Garden and Hilton.
I travel to the Bay Area for work quite a bit. No hotel I’ve ever stayed in has F/X. Maddening for me, since there’s about five shows I love that are on that channel.
And this is expanded basic cable - I used to live there so I know the numbers for the Comcast expanded basic cable and they are all correct for other channels, and I get Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, etc, just not F/X.
And they only have the one HBO channel that shows the same exact four programs every single night, rendering that channel useless the rest of my stay, but that’s another rant.
Disney resort hotels carry nothing but local channels, and Disney family channels. If I had known that for a conference I went to in Orlando, I’d have stayed in any of the other hotels in the list.
Hotel TV is terrible for business travelers who have nothing else to do when they return. I did like some of the more “extended stay” type places, as they tended to have a traditional cable connection.
