General Evans Above Archive for Mar 31, 2003

Buyer beware

Mar 31, 2003 – permalink

– Internet access.

In this day and age, when a hotel lists “internet access” as one of the features of their rooms, what do you expect? Like many hotels, you’d expect high-speed internet access.

When we went to the Oscars® in March, we were booked at the Holiday Inn Hollywood Walk of Fame. It’s in a great location for covering the Academy Awards® as it’s just a couple of blocks up the street from the Kodak Theatre’s Hollywood & Highland complex.

The hotel’s web site listed internet access as one of the features of each room. This is a perfect feature to have when you, oh I don’t know, run a website and need to upload photos, etc.

When I entered the room, I looked around for the network jack. Not finding one, I headed down to the front desk.

“Hi. Where’s the network jack for the internet access?”

“We don’t have one.”

“Your website says you have internet access in all the rooms.”

“Yes, dial-up access. There’s a dataport on the phone.”

At that point I tried to explain that “internet access” is not a distinct feature of the room when you also list “dataport on phone” as a feature too. Realizing that I wasn’t getting anywhere with the front desk person, I asked to see the manager.

The manager followed the same ridiculous logic.

“The internet access is dial-up. There’s a dataport on the phone.”

Again I tried to explain that internet access is not a feature of the room if the person is expected to dial-up their own account. Otherwise you may as well list all the other great features of the room’s phone like “ordering pizzas” and “calling friends and relatives.”

I think it’s fairly misleading for Holiday Inn to list this on their web site. If high-speed internet access is a must for your travels, I strongly suggest you call ahead to confirm so that you don’t fall victim to deceptive (and stupid) marketing like this.

Thank you

Mar 31, 2003 – permalink

I called 411 today to get a number. When I thanked the operator, she seemed surprised and thanked me. Do people really find it so hard to say those two little words?