International WiFi specialist iPass Inc. has published a new report that shows mobile workers rate having WiFi as the second most important factor when they visit a hotel. It was only topped by the need for a comfortable bed.
However, 81% of respondents said they’d had an unsatisfactory experience with hotel WiFi in the past year while 74% said a bad WiFi experience would dissuade them from booking a return visit.
51% of people were prepared to pay for hotel WiFi, with 82% noting that free hotel WiFi tended to be limited, slow and unreliable.
Evan Kaplan, CEO of iPass, said “Wi-Fi is a disruptive technology; it changes the way we work. This report spotlights some of the key trends driving that disruption, such as the proliferation of Wi-Fi-enabled devices and access to bandwidth-hungry business applications like cloud apps, video conferencing and other unified communication tools, which demand quality internet connections and define productivity for corporate travelers around the globe.”
The survey contacted over 1,375 business travellers from around the world.
This desire for WiFi echoes a Honeywell Aerospace survey from earlier in the month, when almost 90% of air passengers said they’d give up preferred seats, extra legroom or other amenities to be guaranteed a better in-flight wireless connection.