Lay My Hat

We are considering getting wifi but are concerned that guests will complain and leave bad reviews if the speed is slow. Also if the wifi stops working it may cause extra hastle fixing it as we don't live nearby. I would be grateful for any experiences our thoughts on whether wifi has made a difference for them?

Thanks

Rosehill wrote:We are considering getting wifi but are concerned that guests will complain and leave bad reviews if the speed is slow. Also if the wifi stops working it may cause extra hastle fixing it as we don't live nearby. I would be grateful for any experiences our thoughts on whether wifi has made a difference for them?

Thanks

You'll lose bookings if you don't have it. I have an uncapped connection for guests. It's as good as it gets in rural Wales which isn't great but I forewarn them and it's been fine. It was down for 2 weeks after a major storm but again I pre warned the guests.

It's in my T&Cs that we do not guarantee a connection

+1

It's an expectation as opposed to a desire now: year on year the number of people asking us whether we have WiFi has decreased... replaced with an automatic 'what's the password?' when they arrive. To not have it (even if it's a bit ropey at times) would reduce your number of bookings and repeat bookings.

I agree with Cymraes. Wifi is essential. We're in the French countryside and are lucky if we get 2mb and that's fine. Our guests use it all the time to stay in touch with family, research where to go out, etc.

We also have Netflix and Amazon Prime on our smart TV which work surprisingly well with very little bandwidth.

Where it seems not to be essential is by the pool. We worried that our guests would want it (we haven't found a way to get it to reach the pool) but they seem quite happy and those who really want to stay connected have 3G (or is it 4G - all this is beyond me!) mobile phones.

yep you will get reviews complaining about slow internet. Personally I would not consider them bad.
Over the many years we have run this business supplying this service has changed.
We first moved in we had no internet for the guest and had dial up for ourselves. With a PC each it was not a pleasure.
Moving on rapidly we now have a connection using 4G. However, even that was not good enough for the guests as they wanted to lie in bed, and connect. Connection was fine in the dining room. We have just installed repeaters, at a great cost.
Ben reading your other posts and it seems you are not on site so lock away the router, just so the adults cannot play with your toys.

Unlimited internet is a must.
Get the fastest you can (why assume it will be slow?).
It is an essential requirement now as others have said, and you will have to absorb the cost ( no one ever puts it as an extra cost these days).

Good WiFi will be a selling point for you. Even caravan sites have WiFi access and to not have it puts you at an extreme disadvantage.

Edited to add:
I see from another post of yours that you are looking for maximum occupancy ( not sure what your expectations are when you say “full”).
A good agency has filters on their website and internet/WiFi is always one of them. If you don’t have WiFi then your property won’t come up in people’s short list of properties. I am sure your occupancy rates are directly affected by lack of WiFi.

casasantoestevo why have your "repeaters" (whatever they are) been at great cost? We just have a small booster thingy plugged into a socket on the landing which extends the wifi signal from the ground floor where the router is up to the bedrooms. Cheap as chips.

Yes you must have wifi - unless you want to restrict your target market to a very small niche that you won’t be able to reach with mainstream advertising.

It needs to be the best you can provide, but it will be what it is; if it’s slow, not suitable for streaming, or capped say so on your website so that guests have the information prior to deciding whether to book. Guests will expect to have it to be able to keep in touch, surf for local events etc. If they want it as their prime source of entertainment, they’ll have to book elsewhere.

Check out other possible solutions if you can’t get anything reasonably fast - is 4G available and could you use that? Rural microwave installation? Satellite? All of these will be a capped service; we have a microwave service and a data allowance of 30Gb for a 7 night stay has proved to be fine, with most guests not getting anywhere near that. I was surprised that the usage wasn’t more, however, most of our guests don’t have young children and teenagers. If the data allowance had been reached consistently I’d have the option of paying for a higher monthly allowance, which I’d anticipated needing to do but hasn’t been necessary; however, I wouldn’t be able to get sufficient data allowance to cope with the demands of cyberkids - ie unlimited.

Don’t even think about charging for the service (maybe if the data allowance is reached and guests want to buy extra) as you immediately set expectations of speed and availability; availability is beyond your control.

Its essential. I wouldn't book anywhere without it. All my guests use it.

Thank you all for your responses which are overwhelmingly in favour of having wifi. As the cottage is minutes walk from the beach in Paignton we had hoped guests would not need it but perhaps this is no longer the case. Does anyone have any recommendations for good internet providers?

We have experience of talk talk at home and although the price is good the connection is not always great. As we live in yorkshire if there is a problem with the wifi we can't fix it so need something reliable.

You need to research who and what is available in your area first. Then when you have a shortlist and have checked out reviews for customer service come back for us to comment on from our experiences.
Internet provision is still very much location specific, but it sounds like you are in a large town so should have plenty of choice.

The providers are first utility, talk talk, SSE, Sky, EE, Vodafone, post office, plus net and now TV in Paignton. They are unlimited usage speeds of 10mb prices around 16-20pm. The most important thing for us is reliability as we cannot fix it if it goes down. Can anyone recommend any of these providers?

We don't charge anymore for wi fi, don't think many people do. We cover ourselves by putting this on the contract

The Wi Fi is provided free of charge and does not form part of the booking contract, if for some reason it fails we will do all possible to get it reconnected but there will be no liability on our part for clients wireless devices not being able to access the Wi Fi nor for outages beyond our control.

SPJ wrote:casasantoestevo why have your "repeaters" (whatever they are) been at great cost? We just have a small booster thingy plugged into a socket on the landing which extends the wifi signal from the ground floor where the router is up to the bedrooms. Cheap as chips.

The cost of the repeaters, new power supplies for said, relocating router so that it can send a clear signal to the repeaters.
Simple "plug ins" can be played around with or removed by those who are not meant too.

I guess we've just been lucky. So far as we know, our-plug in has not been touched in the last 3 years. And quite frankly, it's so cheap I wouldn't worry that much if we did have to replace it. Mind you, ours is a small cottage - 2 up two down, so it wasn't a big issue to get the extra boost upstairs. Sounds like yours was much more complicated.