Hoshnasi

I am noticing a serious disappearing act going on at Hotels and coffee shops as far as free Wifi goes. I guess wifi in Hotels and Starbucks have pretty much already disappeared, but I digress. Why all the access restriction? I don’t want to pay for a coffee or a hotel room and NOT be able access the internet. If the establishment wants my money the establishment needs to entice me to go there. In the case of the coffee shop, sure you have soft couches and nice drinks, but so does my house! Plus I can put BOOZE in my damn coffee and surf the net naked! This applies double for the hotel room! Especially if I or the company are shelling out upwards of $250.00 a night for. So here is what I think cafe’s should do.

• Hourly restrictions: A cafe could tie a number generated at checkout on a receipt to an hour (or two) of wifi. When the hour runs out, person buys more. That way, you keep the coffers full without loosing money on the free-loaders.
  • Taking this further, lets say you needed uninterrupted access to the net, as I sometimes do accessing a VPN and remote desktop. It would be REALLY sweet that if the web login page that takes the receipt number would spawn a timer that counts down to the end of the free time. As I got close to the end, I could buy a bit more food/beverage and enter the new number to continue the timer and sustain my uninterrupted access.
• Change the access point name: As I read on the NY Times some cafes just change the access point name every few hours to something “Buy a large latte get a brownie free!” This seems like a better option, but for some the sudden lose of connection could come at a bad time.
• Or put up a few signs, something light that says something along the lines of “Free Wifi isn’t free, would you care for another cup?”

As for hotels, I don’t know the cost numbers here so I can’t comment on whats profitable. I can however say that many try and go after the sought after “Business Traveler”. The business traveler will often require net access to work long after they have returned to the hotel from what is more than likely a twelve or more hour long day. They need to work not only to keep things aligned at the office back home, they also need to work to keep things cool with the family. For example, I spent Valentines alone last year in Salt Lake City, UT. I net access and after I got back to the room spent the evening chatting with my then fiance and working on Google Docs planning the wedding. If I had to come home after working thirteen hours and then fool around with some janky web login system with my cooporate card that in many cases DOESN’T show up on the hotel receipt so I have to track in manually when stating my charges I’m going to be really steamed at the hotel.

Make the consumers life easy. Give the Wifi away free.