Why the hotel industry should reconsider its attitude to Wi-Fi

In anticipation of the tourist boom in Russia, associated with the upcoming World Cup, domestic hoteliers should think about the quality of service. After all, tens of thousands of tourists, attracted by football, in the future will want to visit our country again and probably stay in the same hotel. In this article we will summarize a large-scale survey of hoteliers in Western Europe, who identified certain problems with the organization of hotel Wi-Fi.



When a person stays at a hotel while on vacation, he wants to write to his family and friends about the hotel, restaurant and room, but if he does not have access to the Internet, no one will read these stories. For some, such inconvenience does not matter much, but for others it can seriously spoil the impression of the hotel, and if the guest is a businessman, not a tourist, the lack of access to the Internet will call into question the success of his trip.





Unfortunately, many hotels in Western Europe underestimate the importance of providing full-fledged Wi-Fi services, although in the long run this threatens to lose potential customers from Generation Y, who may prefer competitors to traditional hotels, such as Airbnb, which offers rental housing in the private sector.

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ZYXEL decided to find out how the hotel industry with the help of Wi-Fi services meets the needs of customers for constant access to the Internet, and interviewed more than 400 IT managers from nine European countries. To our surprise, hoteliers do not consider Wi-Fi as one of the three main criteria by which travelers choose a hotel. According to managers, these criteria are the place, price and reviews (in order of priority). This data sharply differs from the results of our previous study conducted in the UK in 2016, according to which British hotels consider Wi-Fi to be the second most important criterion when choosing a particular hotel, and almost half (49%) of the 1028 respondents answered so.



Both businessmen and tourists view Wi-Fi as a standard hotel service, including unlimited access to Wi-Fi in the room. The overwhelming majority (95%) of managers of European hotels agree with this opinion, however, they and their guests have completely different ideas about satisfactory Wi-Fi quality. Guests need the same Wi-Fi services that they use at home, and they believe that often hotels do not provide such services. It is no coincidence that poor Wi-Fi is the second most common cause of complaints from hotel guests after noise in the room.





You should not expect that if the hotel has poor Wi-Fi, then guests will use 3G / 4G to access the Internet. In many places, especially in rural areas, there is still no reliable data service over the cellular network. In addition, guests from other countries often cannot use cellular communication due to the high roaming data rates, so for them Wi-Fi is the only affordable option for connecting to the Internet.



Such frequent complaints should be cause for concern of the entire industry, however, almost a third (37%) of hotel managers stated that they had no problems with their Wi-Fi service, and only 10% of them are “not very satisfied” or “completely not satisfied ”with the Wi-Fi service that their hotel offers to guests. Nevertheless, more than half (52%) indicated that they have problems when guests try to connect many devices to the wireless network, and 12% of respondents constantly face this problem.





According to the GlobalWebIndex index, the average number of connected devices of individual users reached 3.64, and according to Emarketer last year, smartphone penetration in Western Europe exceeded 70%. Thus, problems with Wi-Fi services will become more complex, especially in connection with the transition of companies to the use of cloud technologies and the growing popularity of streaming online video services among consumers.



Also, the hotel industry should take into account that for many people from Generation Y, the main thing in their life is a smartphone gadget, so they need to provide a permanent connection and personalized services. So far, only some of the major hotel chains have realized this.



Digital technology is a double-edged sword: they give new players the opportunity to press the market leaders, but the leaders themselves can develop their advantages with the help of digital technologies and increase their market dominance. Although the impact of digital technology on the hotel business is not as clear as on the media market and private car leasing, travel agencies, however, have already encountered problems in supply chains, such sites as TripAdvisor, and Airbnb's private rental service. On the market.





The dominant position of traditional hotels is undermined by new players in the market, ranging from luxury boutique hotels to budget-friendly online rental sites such as Airbnb. It seems that so far the owners of traditional hotels have not realized the importance of Internet access services for their guests. They risk losing a significant portion of customers if they do not provide them with first-class Wi-Fi services that work just as well or even better than home wireless network services.



Traditional hotels must offer attractive services for Generation Y, which has now become financially wealthy and loves to travel, to remain competitive. For this generation of permanent access to the Internet at the hotel is no less important than the quality of the room, restaurant or concierge services.



Unfortunately, many hotels do not see anything terrible in the fact that they have poor Wi-Fi, although this service is also necessary for many guests, like traditional in-room services.



The full report on the study is available here .