Yet, it causes "the pain of paying" and micro-transactions in general go directly against common sense and general marketing ideas of building a luxury/exclusive hassle-free feeling brand.
Especially since the payment process at those upscale hotels often was/is seperate from the room-paying process and was a total hassle (making an account through some crappy GUI, entering credit card details manually, etc).
It definitely felt super cheap and greedy to me when I stayed in those up-scale hotels for work and wanted to use wifi.
Yes I will never forget or forgive being forced submit my details to some Marriot bonvoy spam club in order to qualify for free WiFi in an expensive US hotel where I was staying for a conference. It was otherwise a manual daily payment via a broken portal of fifteen dollars. The cost of roaming mobile data in the US (from the UK, at the time) was completely absurd so they had me over a barrel for the hour or so connectivity I needed from the hotel per day to check in with work.
They wouldn't/couldn't just add it to my room invoice either so I would have had to manually pay on a personal card, and expense each day. From memory the portal did not accept my card on the first try either.
I'll take my boycott of them for this slight to my grave.
Are mid-range businessy hotels really working with such slim margins that its worth alienating customers like this?
I had heard the explanation at one point that pricey hotels were the first to adopt wi-fi systems and locked themselves into expensive long-term contracts, so they were still trying to recoup the costs even as the tech got cheaper and more widespread. I guess it's been long enough now that that wasn't the real reason.
Wi-Fi and Internet access in general killed off an enormous revenue source for hotels: pay-per-view porn. They were very motivated to find new ways to get that revenue back.
Anecdotally having been on the road at the time, there didn't seem to be a correlation between price and whether they had it or not.
And often the 1½-star motel would just have a single AP in the office serving the whole horseshoe of rooms directly, while the big fancy hotel would need several APs per floor which made it a vastly more expensive and complicated deployment. If the cheap one was acting weird, the desk clerk could just power cycle it and most issues were resolved moments after one phone call. But everybody at the big hotels was afraid to touch it (probably had been instructed not to), and resolving problems took hours or days.
Especially since the payment process at those upscale hotels often was/is seperate from the room-paying process and was a total hassle (making an account through some crappy GUI, entering credit card details manually, etc).
It definitely felt super cheap and greedy to me when I stayed in those up-scale hotels for work and wanted to use wifi.