HOTEL WI-FI: SHORT TRIP TO A LONG STAY

Two years ago, Wi-Fi access in hotels was a promising notion with a somewhat slippery grasp on reality. A business traveler keen on the rapid expansion of public Wi-Fi hot spots might have found a few hotels in the nation’s largest cities that advertised them, and a couple of network operators or aggregators that claimed to have struck deals with various hotels to install and maintain their hot spots. Often, however, these advertisements and claims turned out to be bogus--or at least over-enthusiastic about the truth.

A concierge at one major hotel in downtown Chicago told Telephony, “We found out two years ago that this aggregator company had our hotel in their listing of places with Wi-Fi when we were only very early in talking about whether or not that would happen. There were one or two people a month who’d come in and ask about Wi-Fi, but it wasn’t a big thing.” (The concierge asked for the name of the hotel and the name of the aggregator to be withheld because the hotel is part of a national chain that has since struck a contract with the same aggregator.)

Futuretech Enterprises, a company that has installed Wi-Fi hot spots at several hotels, claims to have installed one of the first at a Marriott Courtyard hotel in Long Island City, N.Y. about two years ago. “I sold them on it based on my own traveling experience,” said Bob Venero, president and CEO of Futuretech Enterprises. “They had wired every room with Cat 5 Ethernet, but I told them that wasn’t enough. We did the installation pro bono, just to prove its potential.”

Needless to say, Venero no longer needs to comp installations. Just two years later, Wi-Fi access is rapidly become an amenity, or at least a separately-priced offering, in many hotels and chains; Futuretech has deployed coverage for more than 30 hotels, and recently closed a deal to supply a 260-location hotel chain with Wi-Fi access. Also, hotel guests have become some of the most valued Wi-Fi users because of the long durations of their access sessions. Unlike airport Wi-Fi users, who probably are online only briefly before their flights take off, hotel Wi-Fi users settle in for longer stretches of work.

According to iPass, a virtual network operator that provides secure remote broadband access to corporate travelers, session time per venue among its users is about 135 minutes at hotels, compared to 53 minutes at cafés and 33 minutes at airport hot spots.

Currently, iPass has under contract access from 14,000 Wi-Fi hot spots supplied by 75 different Wi-Fi operators. About 7800 of those hot spots are live so far. About 58% of total Wi-Fi usage among iPass customers occurs in airports, but that number has been shrinking for the last year and a half as hotel usage, currently at 20%, has been growing, the company reported.