Hotels; avoiding their horrendous wifi charges

I know why business hotels (which I mainly use when overseas for work) charge for wifi access; guests need the service and are not paying with their own money. That explains how they are able to charge £20 a day but it doesn't really justify it, especially when the cost of providing the service is, on a day-to-day basis, as near to zero as makes no difference. In a world where train operators, publicans and cafe owners offer wifi for free, surely the world's major hotel brands can do the same?

And they could, of course, but they just don’t need to, they aren't feeling the pinch of serious competition and guests are “happy” to pay. As a result, hotel wifi networks are generally slow, intermittent, expensive and, if that weren't enough, often difficult to connect to and limited to one device per charge (“a phone, an iPad and a laptop? That’ll be £60 per day, please”). The answer is simple but not necessarily easy to implement; stop paying the charges.

The trick, of course, is to minimise the sacrifice of utility and make the process as painless as possible. The easiest way to do this is to choose a different hotel, one with wifi included in the room rate, but this is often a low quality solution; many hotels will advertise free wifi but charge for its use if you venture outside the public areas, like the bar or lobby. Work can sometime be completed in the bar but sooner or later you’ll need peace for a phonecall or to concentrate on something difficult or your laptop will need charging and you will be kicked offline as you head back to your room.

Another option is to find a local cafe or coffee shop that offers wifi to its customers. As with the hotel bar you lose a little privacy and a rather larger amount of convenience (you may not find a suitable venue in the immediate vicinity of your hotel) but at least you should be able to get a decent cup of coffee (the value of good coffee when you are far from home cannot be overstated).

You might be able to rent a mobile phone or a 3G card but the costs probably wouldn’t be much less than just paying the hotel fees even if you gain some flexibility. If you’re abroad, 3G roaming costs (£3-£6 per Mb on my plan, depending on destination) are prohibitive and even at home it isn’t always easy to share data plans between devices (ever tried that with an iPhone?).

If none of that appeals the only choice is to drop off the net when you travel, which isn’t very appealing, especially as mobile data in particular is most useful when in a foreign city. That’s why, when I can’t get a hotel with inclusive wifi, I end up paying the hotel’s charges; life is just too difficult without access to the web.