This may be just an artifact of my personal experience, but I think I’m finding that the hotels offering “free Internet” are more often the low-priced hotels than the more expensive ones. At least in Paris and London.
It’s not uncommon to find a hotel over 250€ per night that has a 15€ or higher charge for Internet access. But in the hotels I frequent—I’m fine with just a bed with barely enough space to move around the edges, a shower, and Internet connection, for just over 100€ a night—it seems to be more common to have a free Internet connection included.
Perhaps this is a reflection of younger travelers looking for less-expensive hotels and being attracted like flies (there is one buzzing around my head at this instant here in Paris’ 5eme where I am connected while sitting in the hotel lobby preparing to take the metro to a meeting) to hotels that provide connectivity.
And the true boon is that Skype on my iPhone can connect to the free wi-fi Internet and I can make Skype calls without having to purchase those “overseas” (and overpriced) mobile phone minutes! Quite a difference to spend USD$0.02 per minute rather than $1.29.
{Part of Sky’s series on using tech when traveling}
Jim Schuyler (“But just call me ‘Sky’ — if Sting and Bono and Madonna can have just one name, then so can I”) is CTO of Traveling Geeks as well as CTO of The Dalai Lama Foundation, an international foundation for ethics and peace.
He recently founded CyberSpark.net to protect organizations that guard and promote free speech around the world. Sky is best known as an e-learning pioneer in online and edutainment software.
