One in three people won’t return to a hotel with bad WiFi

One in three holidaymakers will blacklist a hotel from future stays if they’ve experienced a poor internet connection.

Many of us have stood in hotel corridors and lobbies in the middle of the night to get a stronger connection, found a survey of 2,000 travellers by networking kit manufacturer, Netgear.

Yet hotels seemi to ignore the requests of customers, with 76 per cent of venue managers thinking customers care more about quality of service compared to essential facilities like WiFi and 43 per cent assuming customers would rather get a good deal than have a solid WiFi connection.

Jonathan Hallatt, Netgear’s regional director UK, Ireland & South Africa, said: “People away from home want to share their experience in real-time. They want to send or post pictures and stories. Others want to keep a watching brief on what is happening back at the office.

“Hotels must wake up to this fact and take action. Guests should be allowed to choose for themselves whether or not to connect, not to have that decision made for them by the hotel.

“Customers don’t expect a drop in electricity power across the venue and the same now goes for WiFi. If something takes five minutes to download in the lobby, it should not take five hours back in your room.”

Holidaymakers are not only downloading games, streaming media or tweeting on social networks, but increasingly want hotel WiFi to keep in contact with work, the research shows.

Some respondents said they had to abandon family holidays just to seek out a solid WiFi connection so they could contact the office.

Hallatt explained that consistency and quality are of very high importance and hotels need to take action on this particular customer request. Smaller venues should go for the basic option and install a cost-effective solution that may not offer top speeds but is at least reliable and can be accessed from guest rooms.

If you want to check out the WiFi speeds at the hotel you’re heading to this summer, you can use the Hotel WiFi Test site, which grades hotels around the world in terms of reliability and speed of the connections.