A hotel brand creates customers with wi-fi
Hotels were once notorious for squeezing customers with extra telephone charges. Hotel “guests” had to put up with this because they were captive customers that had few options once in their rooms.
Of course, all that changed with cell phones, which hotels couldn’t control. Hotels adjusted by duly shifting extra charges to dial-up and broadband access, which customers also needed. (On a recent trip to Singapore our hotel charged S21.00 for 24 hr. increments of broadband, or S15.00 for 10 minutes of access in the Business Center.) With the advent of wi-fi, wireless access was also looked upon as another high-margin income stream, where guests would have to pay up.
But not everywhere. Free hotel wi-fi is now a marquee differentiator among hotel brands. Kimpton Hotels is a leader in this regard, as noted in this survey.
Kimpton once again tops the list as the undisputed hotel WiFi kings. The brand improved their now legendary free WiFi service in the last couple of years, by extending their fast, reliable WiFi network to your upstairs room, at many hotels. Yup, at most Kimpton hotels you *can* actually sack out with your computer on the bed wireless and happy. This scenario is oft-advertised by other hotel chains, but hardly ever a reality. Kimpton doesn’t count on their lobby WiFi network to reach the top floors of their buildings, instead, at the hotels we visited, Kimpton actually had two separate WiFi networks–one for the lobby and the other for the guest rooms. Both networks are easily accessible by clicking on a standard terms and conditions. Furthermore, during our Kimpton visits, friendly staffers went out of their way to ask us if we were getting a good reliable WiFi signal in both the lobby and our room, and guess what? We were. Kimpton Hotels tend to appeal to business travelers, hip leisure travelers, and globe-trotting bloggers.
These days, one of the keys to being a good hotel is to be a good office. If your brand strategy is to grow your customers, you can find ways to enable their effectiveness even when they’re relaxed in your posh digs. Kimpton has certainly figured this out.
Here is what Kimpton said regarding its complimentary broadband and wi-fi deployments:
We are proud to be able to provide guests with complimentary Wi-Fi and Wired HSIA service,” said Andrew Furrer, Kimpton’s director of corporate IT. “Offering Wi-Fi and Wired HSIA demonstrates that Kimpton is committed to
integrating the latest technology into its amenities. Offering these services free of charge demonstrates that Kimpton is taking a forward thinking approach and taking guest service to the next level.
They will probably get more business from this simple brand strategy than from a dozen big-buck media campaigns.