Marriott have outsourced their WiFi access to STSN. There's nobody in the hotel who understands it and the only detail is a single photocopied sheet behind the reception desk althought there was a 5 foot sign in the bar advertising it.
When I first tried to connect I got endless captive portal errors that always ended with a 404 page not found error.
So I eventually found a support telephone number on one of the signs. This turned out to be a premium rate number to a call centre in the USA. After running round the usual useless menus and stock responses followed by call waiting music, I finally got to an operator, explained the problem and then was cut off. That support call cost me £8.00.
A few minutes later I went back to the WiFi and got through to the credit card entry screen which I think was IE6 only. This got me online with a popup window that had the logoff button on it. There was no indication that I had to logoff to kill the session, only that if I didn't I wouldn't get an email confirmation of the cost.
With the bar full, the wifi was seriously flaky despite apparently having good signal. Somewhere in there and what with suspending the laptop to wander up to the meeting, back to the bar and rebooting the laptop once, the popup window was lost. I got into conversation with a couple of people so it was 25 minutes later that I found out I was still on line.
I thought I'd better make sure I was logged out so I went to the STSN site and despite lots of FAQs about configuring WiFi on XP, there was nothing about killing the session. By chance I managed to find the popup window URL in the browser history. Sure enough I was still logged on so I did a final email collect and logged off. Imagine my surprise when I saw the bill.
£27.25 for 88 minutes online!
This surely plumbs new depths for ripping off customers. Given the prices in the bar as well, clearly London Marriotts are designed to fleece expense account travellers unmercifully. But frankly given the hoops I had to jump through, I wonder what I would have been charged if I hadn't found the logout button. I've got no reason to believe that I wouldn't still be racking up credit card charges.
Ironically while sitting in the bar I could just get signal from a free, unprotected WiFi AP somewhere across the street but not good enough to use.
One further thought. I've had problems before with commercial WiFi that has a signup page. It's often IE6 only and not browser neutral. It often involves a popup page when we all now block popups. If you lose the popup page there's frequently no obvious way to get it back. If you don't log off, it often takes a considerable time to time out and log you off automatically during which you're still paying. It's often stupidly hard to find a support number, get through to support, find how to logoff and there's only very rarely anyone on site who can help.
And they expect to make a long term business from this?
[from: JB Ecademy]
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[ 09-Sep-04 11:40am ] [ G ] [ # ]
(K) KopyLeft 2001 Julian Bond,
