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Comment by andimm | Hacker News Reader

My experience is, the more business traveler oriented the hotel, the more likely you'll be charged for WiFi.

My theory is, often companies have a limit for room prices for their employees, but WiFi fees count additional other expenses so they won't matter for the selection of the hotel.

So as a business traveler you don't care to be charged 20$/day for WiFi, your employer will pay for it. Hotels make nice extra money. Only "normal" guests who care, will be annoyed.

In medium tier Hotels and especially Hostels all around the world I never experienced any WiFi restrictions.

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> My experience is, the more business traveler oriented the hotel, the more likely you'll be charged for WiFi.

I've had the opposite experience. My wife and I usually stay at Hampton Inn or Hilton properties on vacation, two star "business traveler oriented" locations with free breakfast and free low-speed WiFi. It's fast enough for everything except streaming video in HD, and we always bring a Raspberry Pi with a thumb drive full of TV shows and/or movies we want to see while on vacation. Most of the places we've stayed even had free HBO/Showtime for when we want to watch something random.

Conversely, for our fifth anniversary we stayed at a luxury suite for the weekend, and we had to pay for any WiFi whatsoever, and for breakfast (admittedly a much nicer breakfast experience than other hotels).

You are saying the same thing.

It boils down to: Mid-price hotels often have free wifi. Expensive hotels charge much more often. Cheap hotels are a tossup.

My experience as a business traveler is basically: 5-10 years ago I had to pay really expensive Wifi, today I haven't paid any Wifi for a long time.

Business travellers typically have a contract thru their employer with the hotel that covers the wifi. They almost never pay for wifi as an additional charge. The wifi charge is because these business type hotels attract few people who would pay for wifi, so might as well make them pay for it. Free wifi, in essence, is not a marketable amenity for these hotels.

I travel a lot and I don't remember the last time I paid for WiFi anywhere aside from the occasional mandatory "resort fee" that covered a number of things including WiFi. It's true that a number of chains waive WiFi only if you are a member of a rewards program and book through their site but I always do so.

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