Lifestyle Design

Three Problems To Avoid With Free WiFi While Traveling

We love to travel and plan to do much more traveling in the future. Now that we run a small internet business, I’m much more aware of internet access on the road. A lot of people like me do their best work late, late at night when everyone else is asleep so it’s important to have a reliable, free connection in your room. Even though I tried to check (with varying degrees of effort), here are three problems I had just in the last couple of months.

Is The Listing Correct?

A hotel we stayed at during the summer was listed as having free WiFi. Well, they had WiFi but it definitely wasn’t free. They charged $13 per day for it. Ouch! They had a nice business center but even using their computers (or the ethernet jack) was almost as expensive. We couldn’t afford to pay that much so we went without for most of that trip.

Does It Reach Every Room?

One hotel said free WiFi and I verified that they had free WiFi. I guess I should have worded my question differently because not every room could get a signal. Apparently, there weren’t enough wireless routers to cover all of the rooms. Seriously. Unfortunately we got stuck without internet access that trip too.

Where Exactly Is The Free Internet Access?

Another place we stayed at did have free internet access but only in the lobby area. Getting it in the room was ridiculously expensive again. The lobby was super noisy at times and their access system was kind of screwed up. I had to log into their system every 5 minutes or so. It wouldn’t have been that bad but I used a lot of tabs in my browsers. I mean a lot. I would be working on something and click 6 or 7 links to open them in new tabs. When I’d go to those tabs, I’d find out they logged me off already. When I logged on again it wouldn’t redirect me to the page I wanted. So I had to start over with the tabs again. And over and over and over. It probably took me twice as long to get any work done because of that.

Questions I Ask Now

What we’re going to do now is called up each place before we book. We’ll ask them “do you have free WiFi?” Assuming they do then we’ll ask them “do you have free WiFi in all of the rooms?” Hopefully that avoids some of this but maybe we should also ask “how reliable is your free WiFi and internet access?”

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Glad I always have free WiFi at home.