We bought our house as a holiday home for us and have arranged it to suit us and not to maybe fully exploit capacity or attractiveness etc as a rental property.
Although I consider WIFI as an absolute necessity for myself (I gladly leave my cell in a drawer but find internet indispensable for practical reasons and I have 2 teenage kids - need I say more), I always ask myself if any new investment in the property is for us or for rentals and I always have a good grumble if it's more for the rental side of things.
Sometimes you just have to bite the bullit and fork out but like someone said previously if you are fully booked without these extras then why bother?
We're 80% booked so far this year, so there's room for improvement, so I've decided to give it a whirl.
I went online at the weekend and bought a Dongle from Three, on a PAYG plan. I reckoned this would be better thasn a contract; I can control how much Data Allowance is loaded onto it each week. Plus if it gets lost/stolen, I'm not still stuck in a contract paying for something that's not there.
So if I put a 1Gb allowance on each week, it'll only cost £5, then if people want to but top-ups they can do so at cost.
Sounds foolproof on paper
Let's see what happens in practice!
Val wrote:
Sounds foolproof on paper
Let's see what happens in practice!
What you're doing reminds me of when I worked for an IT publishing company in the 90s when the IT Director decided that 3 internet connections in the library ought to be enough for 400 staff.
Check you can get reasonable performance from a dongle there. But the bigger issue is the dongle won't cater for smart phones, multiple laptops etc. I know a family of 4 who went to Italy for a week with 3 laptops, 3 iphones and one ipad and I don't think they're that unusual!
Just get a cheap contract (phone & broadband generally available for just over £20 a month if you shop around)
Londoner wrote:My place is in London and I get asked about wi-fi all the time. The guests are only in the door when they want the code and check their emails.
Even in the middle of the countryside in what is essentially a summer holiday area, we have the same experience, with all nationalities. No one minds that both TVs are almost antiques (no flat screens) and usually when I explain the TV access (UK and Spanish free to air only) the usual response is 'We don't come away to watch TV', but I am quite sure the absence of WIFI (or at the very least an ethernet connection) would be a different matter.
For true domestic harmony it is essential that dogs know their place, which is below all cats
I'm not very techie but what about a dongle thingie? I think you can get pay as go you cover. We've got one that plugs into a unit and gives wifi, but even the wee sticks that go into a computer would allow guest to access the internet and could possibly swing a booking.
I do appreciate that some areas can't get anything though.
Our wifi goes in this October - after much stalling & dragging of heels we have relunctantly relented. Unfortunately I do think it'd necessary these days, especialy for low season bookings when guests will spend more time indoors.
We installed wifi in all 3 of our properties a couple of years ago. I estimate that about 90% of our guests use it to some degree. Those that don´t seemed to have made a concious choice to get away from it! I´m sure we´d get fewer bookings without it.
We share the wifi with two of our properties, and even though we an only get 1mg it seems to work fine most of the time, so it doesn´t cost us any more than it would for just us. The bill for the big house is around 40 euros a month - no cheap options here - but well worth it in terms of extra bookings throughout the year.
Having said that I am having a few problems listening to the radio at the moment on my laptop. A guest seems to be permanently downloading, or something else may be wrong with the supply....will leave it for OH to sort out on his return from the UK as I don´t seem to be able to sort it myself Usually no problems at all though
Bellywobble wrote:I'm not very techie but what about a dongle thingie? I think you can get pay as go you cover. We've got one that plugs into a unit and gives wifi, but even the wee sticks that go into a computer would allow guest to access the internet and could possibly swing a booking.
I do appreciate that some areas can't get anything though.
Yes,I'm hoping this will suffice, and coverage is very good where the cottage is. If people consistently mention they'd like to be able to plug in multiple laptops, phones, ipads in at once, I'll get something with more capacity. The dongle should be fine for checking emails and surfing the web. If they want to stream music and videos they can buy more data allowance.
We strongly recommend it for our our homeowners. If you live near-by, it can be possible to use a repeater to avoid the need to have two phone lines modems etc:. A guest log in is also a good idea. Someone clever with computers might be able to restrict the speed so avoiding potential abuse, but permitting e-mails and things like Facebook.
I reckon, across our cottages, WiFi is worth an average of 2-3 bookings a year and this will only increase. Where it may still be optional for three star, it is almost obligatory for five star.
Our kids have watched as much TV online as they have on the french freeview channels we have by satellite during our last visits to our house in France (there is a mix of french and some english channels via the freebox).
It's maybe their age and their ease with computers that makes it easy for them to find the programmes they want to watch online but it makes me think that Internet/wifi access is more important than forking out on English sat TV. In the few years we have been in business we have never had a query about the range of channels we receive by TV but lots of requests about WIFI availability and its reliability. It's all food for thought....
ccazes wrote: it makes me think that Internet/wifi access is more important than forking out on English sat TV
I completely agree. Only a minority of our guests have English or Spanish as a first language. I suspect the DVD is used more than the TVs (we supply some, mostly in English, but people bring their own). I´ve noticed quite a few listening to the radio or watching TV in their own languages on their laptops.
I agree too having just discovered the TV app for PCs/iPad2 etc the reception is unbelievable. When the satellite reception is jumping all over the place.
Funnily enough I find this can apply equally in the UK. My elder kids rarely watch TV on "the box". They watch catch up TV or downloaded content on their laptops whenever it suits. Add in a PS3 and TV with internet capability and the use of the internet within our household is massive. We have upgraded our broadband to the super fast fibreoptic option to try catering for this now.
We are at the end of a thing the geeks call The Leominster Pipe. Superfast broadband is a distant dream for us with speeds going to a crawl at times like Saturday around 6pm when everyone is back home on their computers.
Rural broadband is no joke... in some areas of the two counties they have no broadband at all. I was a little out of date about how much people are using the internet instead of TV so this has been very useful.
We've got internet TV sites blocked, along with movie download sites and others with very high bandwidth usage, partly because of the available speed here, and partly because of how quickly it uses up the bandwidth allowance in our contract (which I'm looking at increasing). The main problem I'm left with is inventive kids playing online games and finding download sites that aren't yet blocked by OpenDNS; we had some here a couple of weeks ago and they managed to use 6GB of download in 3 days so I'll be having to buy extra bandwidth for this month.
Maybe soon we'll all be having to distinguish between providing wifi access which is only suitable for reasonable use, and access for unreasonable use! Right now it's not easy to keep control when it's serving three properties with lots of different guests over a month.
Usually no problems at all though
