Principal
Consultant, Collaboration / Multimedia / Video / AV
Dimension Data
Director of
Emerging Technology
Interactive
Multimedia & Collaborative Communications Alliance
eMail:
David.Danto@DimensionData.com Follow Industry
News: @NJDavidD
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Hotels,
The Internet and French Fries
Picture this: you go to your local restaurant and order a
burger with fries. When you get your
food you see the burger but only one French fry. When you complain about being short-changed
on the fries the restaurant manager says that when too many people order them
they can’t give everyone the full promised amount.
Naturally we would find this ridiculous. So why do we accept this logic from hotel
internet services when we travel on business?
I was at the Gaylord Palms resort last week for this
year’s Enterprise Connect conference.
(If anyone has any desire to read about the technical bits of the
conference feel free to click here.) EC is one of about a dozen technical
conference / exhibitions I go to every year which represent lots of walking
around, meetings, seminars, etc. Those
commitments in combination with my regular meetings (that don’t go away) make
my remote collaboration tools more essential than ever. A typical day might be waking-up at 5am,
reading and responding to email, taking a quick shower, having a
videoconference from my room, going to the expo floor, calling into another
conference, going to meetings, speaking on a panel, heading back to my room to catch-up,
going to a client dinner, sending out a PowerPoint presentation, getting a
little sleep, then starting all over the next day. In order to have any chance of accomplishing
these tasks my tools and the internet need to be ready to go at any time. That’s why I get angry when the property I’m
staying at gives me the electronic equivalent of one French fry.
The Gaylord Palms is a
beautiful hotel complex now in the Marriott chain – sporting an indoor garden atrium
complete with waterfalls and daffodils – and with rates that seemingly charge
individually for every peek at a flower (which is especially ridiculous in
Orlando, where you can’t spit without hitting a good hotel at a reasonable
price.) On top of that, like many
properties today, they charge a daily “resort fee” to cover access to pools and
spas I won’t use, provide a newspaper that I won’t read, give me two bottles of
water (which I could buy at any CVS for $3.99 for a case of 24) and – give me
“free internet.” Without getting into
the arguments about resort fees in general I would expect that for a total of
nearly $300 a night I would be able to read that email at 5am, have that
videoconference at 7am and send that PowerPoint at 1am. Not last week however. The in-room internet would work very well in
fifteen minute spurts then completely disconnect for five to ten minutes. Remember, I’m no technology novice – I know
full well when a Wi-Fi signal disappears and when an RJ-45 cable loses its
connection to the router that should be providing a DHCP address and pointing
to a DNS server. Yes, BOTH the in-room
wired and wireless dropped out on a regular basis. How ridiculous is that for the home of the
annual Enterprise Connect conference?
If you’re a business traveler, you know how
schedule-killing and exasperating it is when sending a two minute email takes
twenty minutes….over and over…for four days.
When I mentioned this upon check-out, the desk clerk acknowledged the
problem. “Whenever we’re sold-out that
always happens to the internet” is what she said.
I wish I could say that this is the first time this has
happened and only this property is at fault, but I can’t. Being a Hilton HHonors Diamond member for
many years I’ve had my share of Hilton family hotel stays. Hilton graciously waived the internet charges
for its Gold and Diamond VIPs a few years ago, which regrettably made a number
of the property managers feel that if it was free we have no reason to
complain. Amazingly, I’ve only experienced
problems at the higher-end properties.
Every Hampton Inn and Homewood Suites stay has had perfect internet –
and it’s usually free to all guests at those properties. The two worst experiences that come to mind
from last year were at the DoubleTree in Downers Grove, Chicago, and the
Edgewater Beach hotel in Naples, Florida.
In Chicago I was in the middle of an assignment to survey and report on
12 facilities in about 20 days. It was
fly to a location, take pictures, do interviews, then head back to the hotel to
file the report (and catch-up on all the other work I was missing.) I remember it took 30 minutes to upload a 20
page PowerPoint – which is ridiculous.
In Naples, ridiculous doesn’t even begin to describe the property. The impossible to connect Wi-Fi made what
should have been easy catch-up sessions in the middle of a family vacation as
torturous as a Romulan Agonizer. (Add
that to the mildew scented room, the mismatched window treatments and the flop-house
bedding and I’m still trying to find out who in Hilton corporate was bribed
into putting a Waldorf name on that property.
Upon checking out of there I actually told the desk clerk (in my best
Lloyd Bentsen voice) “I’ve been to the Waldorf=Astoria, I’ve stayed at the
Waldorf=Astoria, and this is no Waldorf grade property.”)
My point in sharing all of this is to help business
travelers understand that properly functioning internet is now a utility, no
less important for a hotel room than electricity or hot water. After my Downers Grove stay I complained and
received a partial credit for the multiple day stay (even though they claimed
the internet was provided by an outside company.) At the dive in Naples fraudulently
masquerading as a Waldorf I asked for and received ALL the HHonors points back
for the vacation stay. Both of these
needed to be handled after the fact – as I had very little time while at the
property to deal with the issue. I’m not
going to call a hotel engineer at 5am when I can’t get my email – in the hopes
that they even have a CCNA or CNE on staff instead of just outsourcing the support to
somewhere off-shore, and then having to wait for one to come to my room .
So the lesson here is not to tolerate flaky internet at
hotels – not if you have to pay a resort fee to get it, not even if it’s
“free.” Don’t let properties tell you
that they’re too full for the connection to be stable. Don’t let them con you into paying more for
their “better” or “faster” internet if they can’t get basic service working
reliably. Treat it like the water and
the electricity. If a property can’t
provide the basic utility services a business traveler needs (and yes, stable
internet is a basic service now) then don’t stay there. If you have no other choice then get a refund
when you leave and don’t go back there again.
If the property claims that they can’t fix the problem because “it comes
from a different provider” then explain that the water and the electricity does
too. If they can’t manage their
utilities then they shouldn’t be in the hospitality business.
In addition to knowing how to handle the failure, it is
important to have back-up. I carry a 4G Mi-Fi hotspot to at least get
me some service if the hotel can’t deliver as promised. Business travelers have to compare the costs
of carrying one of those to the cost of tethering their mobile phone
for notebook access. I prefer to use a
separate device on a different carrier because it doubles my odds of getting a
decent cellular signal. I also try to
know where the closest Starbucks is as they usually have very reliable, free
Wi-Fi for customers.
As for the Gaylord Palms…now a Marriott property…home of
Enterprise Connect – the world’s preeminent networking conference…where they
can’t provide a stable in-room internet connection if they’re close to
sold-out…well, I don’t know. It’s hard
to see anything past the irony. Maybe
I’ll just send them a link to this blog and ask them what they think they
should do. Perhaps they need to hire a
network consultant to right-size their infrastructure. I think I know a firm that does that…
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This
article was written by David Danto and contains solely his own,
personal opinions. David has over 30 years of experience providing problem
solving leadership and innovation in media and unified communications
technologies for various firms in the corporate, broadcasting and academic
worlds including AT&T, Bloomberg LP, FNN, Morgan
Stanley, NYU, Lehman Brothers and JP Morgan Chase. He now works with Dimension Data as their Principal
Consultant for the collaboration, multimedia, video and AV disciplines. He is
also the IMCCA’s Director of Emerging
Technology. David can be reached at David.Danto@Dimensiondata.com
or DDanto@imcca.org and his full bio and
other blogs and articles can be seen at Danto.info. Please reach-out to David if you would like
to discuss how he can help your organization solve problems or develop a
future-proof collaboration strategy.