5 Stars for Hotel Wifi

There’s a hotel that has gone beyond providing free wifi, they’ve built their service model around it. Of course this hotel is not in Europe, where business hotels still charge you as if wifi were a special service – instead of normal infrastructure. (I’ve complained before about European business hotels who charge for wifi.) It’s in the Aloft Hotel in Thailand. (Owned by Starwood Hotels, a US company with a range of global hotel brands).

Not only do you have free wifi, you’re handed a phone that gives you all the controls you need, can act as a local wifi station, and as a local phone – avoiding those roaming charges.

For now it does does mean a separate phone, which means carrying two phones, and the risk that the data of any webvisits and phone calls are handed back to the hotel when you check out. In the future it will be built as an app for you to download according to Fingi the company behind the technology.

If only European hotels would wake up and smell the competition.