V Bit Set

As an IT professional I look for hotels with Internet access when I travel. Sure, clean sheets are nice and the free breakfast is delicious, but what I really need is a solid, high speed connection. One DSL line for 200 rooms doesn’t count.

This week when I was on personal business in Santa Rosa, California I chose to stay at the Holiday Inn Express. Sure it would cost more, but it wasn’t the award winning shower head or the heated pool that interested me. It was the high quality Internet access, both wired and wireless, supported by 24 hour, professional technical support. And that is what I got,  at least until I really needed it.

Tuesday morning I woke up unable to get an IP address. Since I had had two laptops previously connected I suspected that their router was the cause. This has happened to me before and typically a call to tech support gets the router rebooted and everything it great. Occasionally they have to call the front desk and get them to unplug the vacuum cleaner and plug it back in or some other trivial solution. Today was different.

After a 20 minute call with the technical support agent, during which for some odd reason I was asked to supply my MAC addresses, I was told I would recieve a call back when the problem was corrected. I bet you already guessed that call never came. So after an 40 minutes of suffering through my GPRS connection I called the front desk who escalated the issue. I received a call back from the technical support company almost immediately. After about 15 minutes of recreating all of the work of the first call I was once again placed on hold and several minutes later informed that they would need to send someone out to the hotel to fix the problem.

We have gotten past the time where Internet access is a luxury. It is a necessity for many people who travel, it is as important to me as water or lights and more important that phone or TV service. I would not complain if I thought that Holiday Inn was doing everything they could and the situation was out of their hands. So what should they be doing?

First, stop relying on guests to tell you when your Internet connection is not working. Any corporation of any size running a complicated network monitors the network for outages and responds before the outage impacts the business mission. This function can be outsourced. If the companies supplying your Internet access and technical support can’t do it, and can’t provide instant support when the problem occurs (not business hours) find someone else.

Second, measure and publish your Internet reliability. If you want me to pay extra, prove to me that you have the 9′s to justify it.

Third, have a policy that offers a cash refund if the Internet goes down, and an backup Internet agreement in place so that guest can go to some other local establishment (FedEx Kinkos, Starbucks, etc.) and access the Internet for free. I honestly don’t care about the refund, but if it doesn’t cost you anything to have an outage then you won’t work to prevent them from happening.