Hotels Offer In-Room Internet Access Over TV, PC

Dozens of hotels have begun to unveil in-room Internet access over both the television and PC this month.

San Jose, Calif.-based 4th Communications Network, which plans the most aggressive rollout, has just unveiled 100 rooms of Internet-equipped computers at the San Jose Airport Hyatt, and Internet-via-TV at the Grosvenor House and Inter-Continental in London, and the Sheraton Palace Hotel in Milan. The firm plans to equip 30 to 50 hotels by the end of the second quarter and 150 hotels by year-end.

Hilton Hotels Corp. has forged an agreement with On Command Corp., launching its first test of the WebTV system this month in all 355 rooms of the San Jose Hilton & Towers. The test, which is complimentary to guests, will include T1 high-speed access and an infrared wireless keyboard.

In Hong Kong, guests of the Conrad International hotel can now connect their laptops to an Internet server in all 513 rooms, paying about $10 per day or renting a laptop from the hotel for $51 per day.

And Sioux Falls, S.D.-based LodgeNet Entertainment recently launched an Internet-via-TV test in all 106 rooms of the Radisson Encorce Inn in Sioux Falls. So far, at least 15 guests surf the Web each night at a cost of $3.95 per half hour, a spokeswoman said. The firm also will hook up the New York Inter-Continental in June, according to Ian Nicholson, the hotel's resident manager.

Most of the hotels connected with 4th Network will mix computers on business floors with TV access in all rooms or on select floors, starting with the Hyatt St. Claire in San Jose, which has just switched on the in-room Net, said Scott Harmon, 4th Network co-founder and senior vice president of marketing and business development. The 474-room San Jose Airport Hyatt, meanwhile, will unveil Pentium PC-based access in every room within a few months, along with Microsoft Office and a Hewlett-Packard printer-fax-copier.

4th Network also has just debuted wireless Internet access at the Sherman House, a San Francisco landmark property. Opting against pulling cables through its walls, the Sherman House lends laptops that access the Internet throughout the hotel, Harmon said.

The firm has forged deals with all of Holiday Inns' West Coast, company-managed properties, as well as with several hotel management companies that include the Embassy Suites, Hampton Inn, Hyatt and Marriott flags.

"People are getting hooked on the Internet," Harmon said. "They have gotten used to this great stuff in the office, and then they go on the road where they really need it because they're disconnected from their support staff and materials."

Pulling up the Web over most laptops, however, "is painfully slow," Harmon said. 4th Network's in-room PCs and TVs will feature T1 access and a unique point-and-click browser interface loaded with scores of Websites.

"One of our jobs is to search all the sites and find a thousand or so that we think are good for travelers," Harmon said. Categories include financial and business services, airlines, and local restaurants and attractions. Clicking on a category yields a half dozen hot links, while a "surf gate" button provides a half dozen search engines.

Guests currently use the remote to flip through the TV version, but 4th Network plans to add keyboards later this quarter.

Hoteliers are upbeat about the system's potential. "I can't put a timeline on it, but I fully believe this is something that will one day be an expected hotel amenity, like a towel," said John Southwell, general manager of the San Jose Hilton and Towers. "Not only do business travelers want access to their desktops, they need it."

While it will be some time until travelers can use the system to access their desktops, Southwell is excited about the acceptance of Internet access in this early test. For the first month, the hotel offered in-room Internet and e-mail access at no charge; then it began charging $3.95 per hour, with a maximum of $7.90 per 24-hour period.

"Going in, we thought a 10 percent usage rate would be tremendous, but we got 42 users out of 300 rooms-14 percent-the first day," Southwell said. "We expected the road warriors to use it, but a lot of other people used it too. We had a sports team in here that used it. The feedback has been tremendous."

In yet another 4th Network alliance, the firm has inked a deal with the world's second largest pay-movie company, London-based Thorn Business Communications. "We will plug into their video-on-demand system, and the hotels won't have to worry about doing anything new in the room," Harmon said.

The company also is teaming with another London company, MAID plc., a firm that aggregates many sources of online financial data into one user-friendly front end for more than 4,000 corporations. The 4th Network Internet service will feature a similar content package by year-end.

The firm is exploring several pricing scenarios in addition to the $3.95-per-hour rate: a flat fee on top of the room charge for unlimited Internet access, per-minute and per-day rates, and free access to parts of the system that are supported by advertising. The San Jose Airport Hyatt, for instance, currently charges $5 per day plus 20 cents a minute, while London's Grosvenor House charges a $15 hourly rate.

With a pay-by-the-hour scenario, "if you use it for 10 minutes and then go to dinner, the system is smart enough to know that you've got 50 minutes left," Harmon said.

At the San Jose Hyatt launch, one guest racked up a $100 phone bill but received 20 e-mails, sent five e-mails and surfed the Web for only $8, Harmon said.

By next year, the firm plans to develop a way for travelers to connect their own laptops to a hotel's high-speed access, a trickier process. "There's a big gap between the connection in the hotel wall and the network card you have in your computer and all the software that you have to run on different networks," Harmon said.

Also next year, 4th Network will launch Web pages customized for each guest.

<I>Cheryl Rosen contributed to this story.