Fair Wi-fi: Consumers getting raw deal

Lending his support to silicon.com's 'Fair Wi-fi' campaign Adam Raphael, editor of influential hotel bible The Good Hotel Guide, explains why the days of rip-off charges must be numbered.

No one likes being ripped off. Yet over the past year, in my position as editor of The Good Hotel Guide, I have been getting an increasing number of complaints about wi-fi access charges.

However, it was not until I went to stay at the Hotel Felix, a boutique hotel just outside Cambridge, that I saw for myself what the moans were about. On the front desk there was a notice saying the charge for wi-fi was £5 per hour or £20 per day.

Though I travel with my laptop, there was no way I was going to pay that sort of money. So soon after returning to my London base, I phoned the Felix's general manager who claimed the hotel's charges were competitive. However, she admitted, as a result of mine and other guests' complaints, she had rung around other Cambridge hotels and had decided to slightly reduce the wi-fi access charge to £4.50 per hour or £14 per day.

Hotels are, of course, in the business of making money but there is a fine line between helping the bottom line and extortion. In London, in particular, the charges are often outrageous, ranging from The Dorchester's £50 flat-rate access fee to The Carlton Tower's £10 for the privilege of half an hour's access in its lobby.

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In my view, it is counter-productive for a luxury hotel to charge for small extras which should be met within the overall bill. Nothing irritates our readers more than finding they have been billed £3 for a paper after spending £300 per night on a pokey central London room. Hotels wouldn't dare charge extra for heating, water, clean towels or soap, so why should they charge for wi-fi access which for many businessmen is equally important?

The fact that hotels have lost an important source of revenue in telephone calls because of the mobile phone is not a sufficient excuse for over-charging. Hoteliers deny this strongly and say that providing and maintaining wi-fi costs them a lot of money. But how convincing is this excuse? Facilities, such as lifts or even background music systems cost a lot more but no hotelier makes a separate charge for them.

As for wi-fi installation and maintenance costs, they have been much exaggerated particularly by those with a vested interest in supplying hotels.

A basic system which is accessible only in the hotel lounge can be installed for a couple of hundred pounds. Obviously if a five star hotel wants to fit a state-of-the-art system which covers every room then that will cost more, perhaps in the tens of thousands.

But over an estimated five-year lifetime, that is still peanuts. Most hotels unfortunately haven't a technological clue and I suspect are being ripped off in exactly the same way as their guests. Some of the more sophisticated hoteliers have realised that providing free wi-fi access is an important marketing tool.

Business travellers may be a captive audience but they don't like being ripped off even if they are on expense accounts.

Adam Raphael is editor of The Good Hotel Guide - an independent guide which takes no money, no advertising and no hospitality from hotels.