Nobody in the industry still denies that providing a free connection to customers is as important a consideration as room towels or running water.
And countless surveys mention the expectations that hotel guests have when it comes being connected when they stay at a property.
But to what extent is that guest obsession to remain tied to the outside world via the interweb?
Serviced apart-hotel provider Roomzzz ran a survey of guests to find out, discovering in the process that the eagerness to log in far outweighs many other things that a guest would normally be expected to care about on arrival.
For example, almost two-thirds of guests will wait no longer than seven minutes after arrival before connecting to a property's wifi (if available).
Furthermore, a third of them will ask for the wifi password during the check-in process and nearly one in ten will have a sense of panic if there is no wifi in the property (although wifi provision is widely considered a key part of the search process these days).
Tetchy Londoners are the most likely to demand free hotel wifi, Roomzzz says, whilst the majority of guests say free wifi is more important to them a room with a view.
Roomzzz's UK head, Mark Walton, says:
"A quarter of those we polled now completely ignore the TV in their hotel room and rely instead on hotel wifi to stream their most-watched TV shows or listen to their favourite music via internet services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify and iTunes, all of which need higher speed wifi."
NB:Hotel wifi image via Shutterstock.