The more you pay for your hotel room the more likely they will charge to provide decent WiFi in your room. Whether a company tries to rip you off with exorbitant prices, or lousy service, is just a function of their lack of respect for customers. Obviously it is cheap to provide decent WiFi (as staying at numerous cheap hotels shows – nearly all offer WiFi completely free).
Most expensive hotels show they do not respect their customers. Some actually do rise to the level of a typical budget, and cheaper, hotels and motels so it isn’t all expensive hotels that fail to meet this low standard. The management of those hotels come from the same school of management thought that produces our bankers.
Jeff Bezos captures one difference between poor managers (prevalent in many spreadsheet focused managers) and lean manufacturing managers with the quote: “There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less.”
Thoughts on: Hotel WiFi Should Be a Right, Not a Luxury
Related: Making Life Difficult for Customers – Verizon Provides Lousy Service = Dog Bites Man – Is Poor Service the Industry Standard?
I was recently forced to stay overnight at a hotel near an airport due to weather delays. I had a coupon from the airline for a decent rate and at check-in initialed the line next to the rate, etc. At check-out the next morning I was given a receipt for the rate + local taxes as expected and it shows zero balance due. When I checked my credit card account a couple days later I was amazed to see an extra $30 added to the pending charge amount. A call to the hotel revealed “We always do this in case there are extra charges not known at check-out time.” I asked (1)Why was this not mentioned at any time during check-in/check-out processing, and (2)Why is this still showing up on my account three days after checkout? Interestingly, the hotel has a process for my credit card company to call the hotel to have the extra $30 removed, but not processes to ensure I would know about and agree to this in advance nor speedy processing of the correct amount. Had the property manager been on-site I would have described my displeasure to that person directly. Needless to say this international hotel chain has dropped to the bottom of my list of choices.
I’ve not thought about this before but you are quite right. It is total contempt. Even Starbucks and McDonalds offer free Wi-Fi so the proprietors must know that we know we’re getting ripped off. Why do they do it? Maybe they rely on the user being indifferent because they are often not the one who pays the bill. I’d also say, from experience, that when these places are great, and you don’t have a problem, they’re great, but they are rarely any great shakes if you have a problem – unlike the smaller places who will usually make more of an effort to put things right
I think this observation will be borne out if you browse reviews on tripadvisor. Five star ratings on five star joints tend to come from people fortunate enough to have had an uneventful stay. The lower ratings usually come from people who’ve had a problem that did not get resolved to their satisfaction. Yep. Support your local independent!
I recently stayed in a ski lodge in the white mountains Arizona for me and the wife’s anniversary. The stay was expensive but the service kind of sucked. I’ve also seen nicer motels rooms. The only benefit was the time it took to get to the ski slopes. If I were to do all over again I would of went with a cheaper hotel in town and just made the 20 minute drive in the morning to the slopes.
Pingback: When Companies Can Treat You Like an ATM, Many Will Do So » Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog