Posted by Nate
Posted on 07-23-2010 under Business Operations

Over the past week and a half, I was on a road trip of sorts up the Northern East coast to attend a wedding in Maryland, my girlfriends Psychology conference presentation in New Hampshire, and yet another wedding in Maine. This was a fun trip filled with plenty of sightseeing, new experiences, and lots of pre-wedding shenanigans with family and friends. Over the course of this trip, we stayed in a total of five hotels, two of which were actually more motel-ish.

Now, for better or worse, I don’t generally like to be without Internet access for too long. A day or two…okay, I can live with that, but more that that and I start to get twitchy. For whatever reason, I just like to be connected to what’s happening out in the world, or with work, or with my inbox, and I’d rather not let all that stuff linger around all untended to. Some might think this is really a thinly veiled Facebook or Myspace or Twitter addiction, but believe me that it’s not. While I frequent those social stops, I don’t feel any habitual need to drop anchor multiple times a day for hours at a time to go Facebooking (new verb?).

But the Internet has become a sort of necessity for me, and thus on this New England road trip I had to bring along my laptop for when we’re not out attending wedding booze-cruises or taking pictures of Paul Revere’s grave. Being that it’s mid-2010, I hoped that our pre-booked rooms all came with in-room wifi.

Not too much to ask, right? Well, yes and no.

Turns out, all but one of the rooms we stayed in had access to free wifi (the exception was a motel in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, but that’s OK because the scenery up there was fantastic and the place was essentially a quaint older person’s getaway motel) but only one of the rooms complementary in-room wifi was worth a darn. And you know what, it wasn’t the nice Best Western in Boston we stayed at or the Microtel Inn and Suites in Philadelphia that flaunts its free wireless access or the Courtyard Marriot in Silver Spring Maryland – all those places might as well have been operating on dial up speeds or worse because they were all slow to connect, slow to operate, and would kick me off soon after I connected, and that’s if I was able to get online in the first place.

It reminded me of the AOL days when you’d listen to the familiar dial up chimes and sort of hope that your computer would establish a firm connection long enough to check your email and visit a favorite webpage or two before the wind blew hard enough outside and you were booted off. How is it, in this day and age that these well known hotel chains can’t get wireless right?

The only place we stayed that had a firm and fast online connection was at a very small and grungy Days Inn in Kittery, Maine that was formerly a Super 8 motel, and before that was most certainly something else. I mean, this place had two doors on either side of the room (a little creepy), a window with a majestic up-close view of the side wall, and a bathroom door that didn’t open all the way because it hit the toilet – but gosh darnit, it had a working Internet connection. I don’t know what’s going on with these large hotel chains and their substandard in-room wireless, but based on many online reviews I’ve read of these and other hotel chains, I’m not alone in my disappointment. It’s 2010 guys, time for a wireless upgrade.

Oh and maybe it’s mere coincidence, but the Kittery Day’s Inn, even with its dark interior and ill-planned room dimensions, ended up being my favorite place that we stayed in. Charm - that’s what it had. And proper wireless.