Susan Stellin The New York Times

July 23, 2003

With so many hotels now promoting high-speed Internet access, you might think downloading e-mail in your room would be as easy as ordering a cheeseburger from room service and twice as quick. But analysts and business travelers offer something of a reality check on the message of faster connectivity that is being pushed by hotels, saying that although such service is becoming more common, it is not something laptop-toting business travelers can count on. It's definitely not everywhere and it definitely doesn't always work, said Rob Meinhardt, who recently started a company, Kace Networks, in California, to help provide remote access to corporate networks. Meinhardt estimates that a third of the hotels he has stayed at in the past year offered high-speed, or broadband, Internet access, but says that he often has trouble getting it to work. That has happened to me dozens of times, where you're sitting there saying, 'I'm not getting my e-mail, where is the problem?'" he said. Among the issues he and other business travelers report are hotels that advertise broadband in most or all of their rooms but only have enough capacity for a limited number of guests to log on simultaneously, cables that get unplugged, routers that are down, and services that require special hardware or software guests may not be traveling with (or do not want to deal with after a long day or a late flight).

I just shy away from that stuff, Meinhardt said, partly because of the difficulty but also because of a reluctance to install software from a disk used by many other guests. After all, he asked, how do I know the last guy here didn't put some virus on that disk?

With industry profits off, hotel chains cannot afford to alienate their most lucrative customers. And whereas business travelers once viewed high-speed Internet access as something of a luxury, they are now increasingly demanding it as an entitlement.

It's almost like your iron or ironing board or your coffee maker things that people come to expect in the room, said Vijay Dandapani, chief operating officer of Apple Core Hotels, which recently installed high-speed wireless Internet access available without charge at its five Manhattan hotels. For technology professionals in particular, reliable, fast Internet access is becoming a requirement in choosing where to stay, prompting one technology company to create an internal list of Internet-friendly hotels, which is now posted publicly on the Web, at www.geektools.com/geektels.

What we started to do was keep a list of hotels in different cities around the world where we came across high-speed access in the room, said Rodney Joffe, founder of CenterGate Research Group, a technology company that started the Geektels site four years ago. Now 5,000 to 10,000 people visit the site daily, Joffe said, though with broadband connections becoming more common, he suggested the list might have outlived its original purpose. According to a survey conducted this year by Forrester Research, which analyzes trends in technology and their impact on business, 9 percent of all hotel guests used high-speed Internet access at least once in 2002, while nearly 19 percent of business travelers tried such services last year. As for issues concerning reliability, said Henry Harteveldt, a Forrester analyst, the biggest bottleneck he hears about is the failure of hotels either to outfit enough rooms for the service or to install enough capacity to accommodate everybody who wants it at the same time. Whether to charge for broadband service, and if so, how much, is another issue the industry has yet to resolve. Travelers report that $10 a day seems to be the average fee.

(C) 2003 International Herald Tribune. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved

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