WiFi for Hotels: Your Best Options & What To Look For

WiFi for hotels is like food at restaurants - your guests will expect it. Of course, every clientele differs slightly. If your hotel is in the middle of the Disneyland resort, you can expect guests to use WiFi to stream movies. Or update the family back home using a video call. Guests will likely use WiFi for work or email scrolling if you have a CBD hotel.

The actual uses of hotel WiFi depend on your customers and brand but are essential when choosing software. The first stage of finding hotel WiFi software is understanding the customers you are shopping for.

With this in mind, let’s proceed with our complete guide to providing internet connection in hotels. WiFi is essential for hotels, but there are lots to consider, so it’s best to break things down. We’ll cover everything from the benefits of WiFi to hotel guests to how safe banking is on a hotel WiFi system. Sit tight, and let’s look closer before you take this major step for your hotel.

Why Offer Hotel Internet? The Benefits of WiFi For Hotels

To play devil’s advocate, why even bother? Offering hotel internet can get expensive, and besides, doesn’t social media control us too much anyway? Why is it so essential to even provide WiFi for hotels, right?

Like it or not, the internet for hotels is a requirement for anyone looking for accommodation. Gone are the days of phone calls and texting; guests nowadays want video chats and social media. The preferences have shifted, and internet use is much more video and image-based. For instance, providing access to Tik Tok.

1. It doesn’t dissuade visitors from booking to stay at your hotel

The first WiFi benefit is it doesn’t give customers a reason to avoid you for not meeting that connection need. The industry is competitive enough, so don’t set yourself at a disadvantage by not offering WiFi.

1. WiFi provides organic marketing through social media

Next, providing WiFi to allow guests to access social media often results in organic marketing. When guests share their location and fun snaps of your hotel online, this is social media marketing. The whole point is that more people see your hotel, meaning more people book a stay.

1. WiFi provides guests with independence, limiting your staff’s workload

Finally, offering hotel internet services limits your staff’s work. Guest satisfaction always increases when guests have the tools to solve their issues. Forget printing boarding passes; guests can download them online. Forget organizing taxis; guests can just book an Uber. Make your life easier by investing in an upfront hotel WiFi installation cost.

How To Access Hotel WiFi - Even When The Captive Portal Isn’t Loading

From a customer perspective, accessing WiFi for hotels should be easy. There should be access points throughout the property for seamless access to the internet. And, if possible, hotel WiFi in every room, not just a specific common area. You should make hotel WiFi available in common and private spaces. This allows for private conversation and remote business meetings. So, how do you access hotel WiFi?

A hotel should provide you with login details upon check-in or clearly display login details in your room. Or potentially on your keycard. Check all these places first, and then if you still can’t find ‘signs of internet life,’ check with the hotel staff. They should be able to provide you with a password and general login details like the network name.

Another common issue with accessing hotel WiFi is that their captive portals don’t load. There are many steps to take if your captive portal doesn’t load. We’d always suggest turning the WiFi on and off again. However, since this is hard to achieve as a customer, just reboot your devices. Most of the time, this will work the first time. If that doesn’t work, clear your DNS cache or try to open your internet browser manually.

In an ideal world, hotel WiFi would work the first time, every time. But we all know how technology can be unreliable. From a customer perspective, there are steps to take independently (like rebooting devices). However, hotel staff should also prep to troubleshoot on customers’ behalf.

Finding A WiFi Booster For Hotel Purposes

Finding a WiFi booster for hotel purposes is one of the best investments you can make for WiFi for hotels. Naturally, not all buildings have a WiFi friendly design. And who can blame designers and architects? Especially when some hotel buildings date back centuries when thick walls were a huge trend. What this does mean, though, is that you may need to find a WiFi booster. A WiFi booster picks up the slack, strengthening the hotel WiFi by boosting the signals in problematic areas.

When finding a WiFi booster for a hotel, you need to consider the brand’s reputation far more. Rather than just investing for personal use, you are investing on behalf of hundreds - if not thousands - of guests. The booster needs to be reliable. And this is even more pressing if you order multiple boosters in bulk, which large hotels are likely to do. You should also consider how many people will be using one booster. All these factors will decide the strength, cost, and brand of your boosters.

Using WiFi For Hotels: Is It Safe To Use Hotel WiFi For Banking

Is it safe to use hotel WiFi for banking? It is a good question. And unfortunately, we have a frustrating answer - it depends. Setting up WiFi for hotels should be a meticulous task. As a hotel business, you must invest in hotel WiFi security. Your WiFi system should be watertight. Then, if your customers want to browse in a vulnerable way, it is safe for them to do so.

Ways to thwart cybercriminals include investing in security software, creating strong passwords, and having a separate guest network (and guest passwords). You should have at least 3-4 different security measures in place. Don’t just add some software; forget to update it regularly and call it a day.

So, to return to the question. It can be safe to use hotel WiFi for banking. However, it massively depends on the security measures that the hotel implements. As a business owner, you can take a calculated risk on exactly how safe your WiFi is for banking. But this can be trickier from a customer perspective. As a whole, using hotel WiFi for banking is a risk. And often, the risk is an unknown one.

Luckily there are ways to make using hotel WiFi for banking safer - even from a helpless customer perspective. You can easily use a VPN to protect your data and vulnerable internet use.

Using VPN On WiFi For Hotels

Using VPN is one of the biggest hacks when using WiFi for hotels - or any public WiFi safely, for that matter. VPN stands for a ‘Virtual Private Network’ and acts as an interceptor when using hotel internet services. It masks your IP address, encrypts your data, and essentially lets you bypass all the rules that a network sets.

Even better, it’s legal and a well-respected way to operate on WiFi networks - so you won’t get in trouble.

Clever and efficient, VPN is a great way to make hotel WiFi a little bit more secure. You can do things like online banking using hotel WiFi more safely using a VPN. It might slow browsing speed and connection, but the benefits outweigh these tiny cons. VPN gets our vote every time.

Popular VPN options include Turbo VPN, free if you don’t mind certain limitations. But there are loads of VPN options out there, so just have a look. You can find a range of free to paid services depending on potential usage. A subscription VPN might be best if you travel and stay in hotels.

What Is A Travel Router For Hotel WiFi

A travel router is an upcoming trend and a must-consider when offering WiFi for hotels. A travel router for hotel WiFi is one of the smartest ways to make connecting to WiFi networks a breeze. Especially when you are constantly coming across new networks while traveling.

The way a router works is that it connects automatically to new WiFi networks, all while keeping your devices online. So you don’t have to keep connecting all your devices to new networks - you manage them from one place. Travel routers are perfect for business travelers carrying many technology gear like laptops and multiple phones.

Travel routers are also ideal for hotel WiFi as they act as extenders, strengthening patchy WiFi. If you end up at a hotel with disappointing WiFi, your travel router can boost it to a much better standard. If you face a glitching business meeting on Zoom, this could save the day. That backup option can be reassuring, especially if you rely heavily on an internet connection. Travel routers are relatively affordable and very portable - by nature. So bringing a travel router for a hotel trip is a feasible, effective way to boost WiFi strength and experience. Rather than hotels offering travel routers, they are something the guest can bring to invest in their hotel WiFi experience. However, hotels can always advertise that they are travel router-friendly. Or even rent routers as a premium WiFi feature - which could be an excellent extra business venture. Renting routers is a superb idea for resorts where WiFi zones change frequently, and many different workspaces exist.

Get creative with travel routers. There’s tons of potential from investing in travel routers, whether you are a hotel owner or guest.

How Important Is Choosing WiFi For Hotels?

Choosing WiFi for hotels is very important. You need to tailor the whole process to your specific hotel from start to finish. What will your guests be using it for? What is your building layout like - and will that mean purchasing WiFi extenders? And that’s before you even start router and software shopping. Hotel WiFi is a big deal and no small undertaking.

To break this down, start with an idea of your guest demographic. This should help you understand if you need WiFi that is great for browsing or super reliable WiFi for streaming. For a family, reliable streaming WiFi is excellent but not a necessity. But reliable streaming WiFi would be paramount for someone working from your hotel. Next, we suggest evaluating your hotel layout to see how many routers and extra tools like extenders you’ll need. Only then can you assess your budget and start shopping. It is essential to take all these steps to guarantee success.

Finding WiFi for your hotel is important, and by sticking to these guidelines, you’ll do a fantastic job. But if you’d like extra assistance and reassurance that you’re on the right track, just drop us a message. At Beambox, we’d love to help you find your ideal hotel WiFi - whichever stage you are in your WiFi journey. As experts in WiFi marketing, we can help you find the perfect match to boost customer satisfaction. Outsource to us, and let’s take your next steps together.

Let’s get started together today. Beambox offers a top all-in-one WiFi marketing platform. We leverage a dynamic approach to connect, capture, and retain more customers. Start your Beambox free trial today, and let us help find you the hotel WiFi of your dreams.

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