A new travel service dubbed Hotel WiFi Test is taking a novel approach to painfully slow WiFi in hotels: a centralized speed test that can be taken in a hotel and then posted directly to social media.
The concept is smart: take the speed test, and get it out into social media for deserved praise or shame. Especially given that many hotels advertise "free WiFi" as a distinct differentiation point, actual bandwidth speed truly does become the issue facing many travelers.
The speed test is quick, and while they encourage users to be currently at a hotel, the test does indeed function wherever a user may be. And for those users testing over a hotel network, the service is able to verify that the actual speed test did in fact occur on a particular network - a sort of "verified review" of bandwidth speeds at hotels.
The service includes a tickbox that allows the user to include the hotel's Twitter handle in the message, alongside direct integration with Foursquare.
This particular integration offers travelers the opportunity to leave the test as a tip on the hotel's Foursquare account. And with Foursquare tips growing faster than Yelp reviews, this means that hotels are facing a very real - and very public - reckoning when it comes to WiFi bandwidth speeds.
Of course, the service still must gain traction and get as many hotel guests as possible to publicly post their WiFi speeds for the world to see - and for the hotels to act upon.
The About page outlines the mantra behind the service:
"We believe that when a hotel advertises free WiFi, they should provide travelers with a fast and reliable connection.
"Business travelers depend on WiFi to stay connected to clients, remain in contact with the office, and to conduct meetings on the go. Recreational guests want fast WiFi or entertainment purposes, and for keeping in touch with family and friends. Unfortunately, many hotels who boast about free WiFi neglect to ensure that the quality the connection is worth the price they charge for the stay.
One of the people behind the service is Andrew Richner, and answered a few questions from Tnooz regarding this novel take on public pressure for better service speeds.
Please describe the concept.
When you stay at a hotel, you take a speed test. The main difference from a conventional speed test (like speedtest.net) is that the test result is linked to the hotel you are in. We use location information calculated based on WiFi networks and some other factors to make sure that the test took place in the hotel. In most cases the correct hotel will be preselected, so there is no need to search for it.
For each test result there is a permanent page. Users can use a link to this page to refer to this test results in social media and in their hotel reviews on booking sites. However, the most important form of sharing is when the result is exposed not just to your Facebook friends, but to all potential hotel guests.
Also, it is important to make the hotel aware. To achieve this we do the following:
- It takes only one click after the test to leave a venue tip on foursquare. This is a very relevant place for such information. Some people look on hotel comments on foursquare before booking accommodation. Also the hotel can see this information as well.
- When you tweet your result we offer an option (on by default) to mention the hotel's Twitter account. As result, the hotel immediately knows about the test. Twitter is public, so it keeps them in check.
What problem is this specifically addressing?
Right now most hotels are not motivated to provide good WiFi quality. They just put "Free WiFi" label and it is good enough for a typical booking site. There is no way for guest to verify the actual speed. High quality WiFi is quite expensive to deploy and maintain, so they just don't bother. What for?
So we have a conflict here. From one hand fast and reliable WiFi is extremely important for many travelers. From another side hotels are not too motivated to invest into WiFi infrastructure and traffic cost.
How will this information be used to pressure hotels into boosting speeds?
*Social sharing:
- Venue tip on foursquare (both potential guests and hotel can easily see the info)
- Tweeting with CC to the hotel's twitter account (the hotel gets notified)
* It is easy to add the info to a review on booking/travel sites (TripAdvisor, booking.com etc.)
* Once we have enough results we will expose them in the way it will be easy to choose a hotel based on its WiFi quality
It seems like there's still only a few results posted. What's your strategy on increasing that number?
We launched the service only 5 days ago. We are quite happy with the growth trend. Of course, it takes time to cover all the hotels. We have quite a few innovative ideas around social marketing that should be quite effective. Please let us keep them private to preserve the element of surprise. We will let you know about all the campaigns as early as possible.
Also, please note that currently we don't show all the results. Before making all the results public on our site we would like to verify and process them. We don't want to show unprocessed/unverified test results. Instead we are planning to feature a complete hotel profile (min, max, expected speed; peak/off-peak hours; indication if there is bandwidth throttling etc.). To achieve this we need several independent test results for every hotel.
Anything else of interest to add?
To finish the story let me mention a recent relevant report with a self-explanatory title: "Wi-Fi Wake-Up Call: Hotel Wi-Fi is Second Only to a Comfortable Bed": http://www.ipass.com/press-releases/mwrq32013/
Among other things it says: "82 percent said free hotel Wi-Fi services to be limited, slow and unreliable. More than one third reported using high bandwidth cloud-based business and collaboration apps such as unified communications that demand continuous high-quality connectivity to get the job done."
NB: Hotel image courtesy Shutterstock.