Hilton Hotels Corp. today announced it is installing wireless connectivity in the common areas and meeting spaces in the 55 U.S. company-owned and managed Hilton brand hotels. The announcement follows by a month a similar declaration by Marriott International, which is building on the existing wired infrastructure in 400 of its hotels to add wireless capability in public spaces and meeting rooms.
Given the size and reach of these two multi-brand hoteliers, the announcements were a milestone in the ongoing evolution of high-speed Internet connectivity in hotels from a wired to a wireless environment. Yet, the basic customer demand driving these developments remained the same: the desire of business travelers to communicate with their offices while on the road, mostly through being able to send and receive e-mails quickly and conveniently.
For such buyers as Kevin Maguire, travel manager at Tokyo Electron America in Austin, Texas, high-speed connectivity has become the guest amenity most in demand by his travelers. "We're a technology company. All of our travelers carry laptops and they take keeping up with their e-mail extremely seriously," he said.
As more laptops and PDAs become wireless-enabled, interest should grow further. "In talks for 2003 rates, high-speed access was the value-added amenity we were most eager to negotiate," said Bill Davidson, manager of corporate travel and meeting services for International Sematech, also in Austin, Texas. Davidson noted that some hotels ended up waiving daily high-speed access charges.
Adopting a wireless platform, however, hardly means abandoning the wired solution. "We don't think of it as either/or," said Lou Paladeau, vice president of technology business development for Marriott. "Rather, we see the wireless deployment as complementing the service we already have." A wired solution will remain in place in guest rooms at the 400 properties, which cross all Marriott brands and are located in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany.
The already installed wired backbone is crucial in adding wireless. "As part of that initial effort, all the routers, cabling and wiring were in place, so overlaying the wireless is not that complicated or expensive," said Dennis Koci, senior vice president of operations support for Hilton Hotels Corp.
"If cable extends to the risers on each floor of the building, it's just a matter of running horizontal cabling through the corridors and then dropping in wireless antennae at various zones in the corridor," Koci said. The Hilton wireless rollout, which was piloted at the Glendale, Calif., Hilton and the Hilton Hawaiian Village, should be completed in 90 days. Other Hilton brands, meanwhile, have developed their own Internet strategies.
For newly constructed Hiltons, the wireless technology will be built-in and available in guest rooms as well. "Since it's easier to add these enhancements when the walls are down, these will be our first completely wireless hotels," Koci said. The 1,200-room Hilton Americas-Houston, a convention center property scheduled to open in November, will be the first of these to come online.
The chance of wired technology ever becoming obsolete is slight. "There always are likely to be people who want to connect to something," Paladeau said, "even if, as expected, wireless deployment accelerates rapidly. As with the wired solution, speed of service, ease of use and security were critical factors in our decision to implement wireless." Paladeau did not give any timeframe for the rollout, which was piloted in Marriott hotels in San Francisco, Irvine, Calif., and Salt Lake City.
Paladeau and Koci said their companies had not reached a final decision on pricing the wireless service. Hilton charges $9.95 a day for unlimited high-speed use from the guest room. Koci said he expected guests paying the $9.95 would not face additional fees for using the wireless elsewhere on the property. Marriott is testing a single daily charge for local and domestic long-distance phone calls plus high-speed access charges at 30 hotels in the Washington, D.C., area
(BTN, Sept. 23, 2002).Travelers using the wired networks in their guest rooms would switch to wireless when they moved to "hot zones," such as a meeting room, the lobby, hotel restaurant or even poolside. "Those whose laptops already are enabled with an 802.11b wireless card connect by simply signing up on a page that appears automatically as the computer searches for Internet access," said Antonio DiMilia, president of third-party vendor StayOnline, which this month completed its 100th hotel wireless installation. The 802.11b technology also is known as WiFi, for wireless fidelity. "For those whose laptops are not yet WiFi-enabled, they typically can obtain a plug-and-play device at the hotel's front desk," he said.
Both Marriott's Paladeau and Hilton's Koci see wireless capability as a form of competitive advantage. "We believe customers have a certain expectation of us as a leader in technology," Paladeau said. "Consequently, we want to leverage this expectation and deploy wireless more extensively and on a larger scale than anybody else."