Flaky Internet Access at Hotels -> Tech Winter Will Continue

by philg

I’m currently at the Loews Le Concorde hotel in Quebec City, a 424-room business hotel recommended by some guys at the airport.  Nearly every aspect of the hotel operation reflects enormous management attention to detail.  Yet when it comes to Internet access they’ve outsourced it to a company called DataValet, “a trademark of TravelNet Technologies.”  When it works you’re supposed to pay $20/day for a 100Kbps link but their authentication server was dead.  So I called the 800-number to talk to a tech support guy.  After about 30 minutes of flailing about I was finally able to connect.


Curious to see how this obviously very effective management, which would not tolerate a burned-out light bulb or a rubbed-off number on an elevator button, was able to tolerate this kind of incompetence, I called the manager.  Although a very nice and competent executive, she was undisturbed by the fact that it was so painful to connect to the Internet at her hotel.  She had even stayed at Hilton Garden Inns where Internet is free and therefore reliable (you just plug in and because they don’t try to charge anyone they can use $50 routers; it is also about 15X the speed of “DataValet”).  But as far as she was concerned it was something that they’d outsourced to a contractor and if it wasn’t working it wouldn’t reflect badly on her management.


I would submit that Internet is the only thing that she would have tolerated sucking in her hotel.  If she’d outsourced room service and the contractor told customers to call tech support and then walk down to the McDonald’s next door, she would change contractors.  If the telephones in the rooms were flaky she would put in new lines, instruments, and switches.


Just as Web sites are an area where companies feel that they can lag leagues behind their competitors (who even bothers to try to do as good as job as Google?), Internet access seems to be one where an enterprise will cheerfully tolerate being 60X worse that its competition in terms of time to connect and then 15X worse in terms of bandwidth.  I infer from this experience that tech companies are in for another few very bad years in which customers won’t want to pay attention to or invest in improved computer hardware and software.

10 thoughts on “Flaky Internet Access at Hotels -> Tech Winter Will Continue”

  1. All too often, whenever a customer complains about anything, a manager’s first instinct is to deny that the problem exists.  If there is incontrovertible evidence that the problem does, indeed, exist, then the next step is to minimize the significance of the problem.

    Certainly, this is the strategy used so successfully by my Internet service provider and by my hosting company.

  2. If room service kept you on hold 30 minutes and told you to go to McDonalds, you’d leave the hotel and go stay somewhere else. (Or at least, I would…and so would enough of their customers that the hotel management would consider this an entirely unacceptable outcome.)

    You didn’t actually say so, but your phrasing implies you are still staying at this hotel. I submit that your problem is actually in the mirror.

    Technology is your business. If you don’t care enough about it to switch vendors when you get bad service, why should the hotel be expected to?

    (Yes, I _have_ left hotels early on the basis of a not-as-advertised internet service. When in-room net access is important to me, I check it before I even put my bags away, and I’m ready to walk out of the hotel and dispute the credit card charge if it doesn’t work properly…and I make sure the management knows it, too. A couple of times, I’ve gotten letters of apology stating that the provider has been fired…and subsequently found service much improved.)

  3. I’ve been traveling quite a bit in the past year and I’ve been surprised at the widespread availability of higher speed net access in hotels. I wish the airports offered more coverage and cheaper rates. Most of the hotels offer free service, though a few will charge $10 a day or a smaller per day weekly fee. And the few places I went to that did not have high speed (or just offered high speed access in lobby) installed it by the time of my return visit.

    Once in Miami @ the MIA Wyndham, I had a problem as I did not have a ethernet cable and they gave me a defective one. They brought me a new one within 30 minutes. Hotels that cater to business travelers are much more cognizant of how important net access is. In fact, if it’s high speed and there is no wireless, I am a bit disappointed. I still keep a dialup account active just in case…

    Going to be taking a extended road trip in September and I’m going to plot a course out that takes into account hotels w/net access…

  4. My #1 b**ch is the front-desker who says “Really? We’ve not experienced *that* problem before” (intonation: “it never bothered anybody else, you jerk”). Ugh.

  6. How is spending money on “liberal causes” the same as “important causes” ???

    There is too much partisan politics as it is. We don’t need any more millionaires (liberals or conservatives) adding fuel to the partisan fire.

    If millionaires want to help the world by donating some of their wealth, there are plenty of non-partisan organizations that aren’t pushing an agenda that could use a helping hand while they help those with real needs.

  7. I stayed in the Lowes Concord this summer. It is not 20$ a day. It was 9.95$ Canadian for a 24 hour time frame.

    The reason you probably had to be on the phone with one of my support staff for half hour is because of an issue with your connection. It’s not DataValets fault. A lot of times, the hotel will invest in cheap cables to save a buck, and it often causes connection errors.

    If in the end you got online, the tech guy was obviously not clueless. He troubleshooted your issue until he got you working.

    Please think before you post things like that.

    THank you.
    -Robert from Chicago.

  8. I stayed in the Lowes Concord this summer. It is not 20$ a day. It was 9.95$ Canadian for a 24 hour time frame.

    The reason you probably had to be on the phone with one of my support staff for half hour is because of an issue with your connection. It’s not DataValets fault. A lot of times, the hotel will invest in cheap cables to save a buck, and it often causes connection errors.

    If in the end you got online, the tech guy was obviously not clueless. He troubleshooted your issue until he got you working.

    Please think before you post things like that.

    THank you.
    -Robert from Chicago.

  9. I stayed in the Lowes Concord this summer. It is not 20$ a day. It was 9.95$ Canadian for a 24 hour time frame.

    The reason you probably had to be on the phone with one of my support staff for half hour is because of an issue with your connection. It’s not DataValets fault. A lot of times, the hotel will invest in cheap cables to save a buck, and it often causes connection errors.

    If in the end you got online, the tech guy was obviously not clueless. He troubleshooted your issue until he got you working.

    Please think before you post things like that.

    THank you.
    -Robert from Chicago.

  10. Maybe you received the poor service because you are anglais in K-Bec 😉

Comments are closed.