Hotels Ranked on Wi-Fi Quality and Price

Hotel Wi-Fi Test recently released a new report  that ranks hotel chains by Wi-Fi quality. Two characteristics of hotel Wi-Fi are considered: the quality of the Wi-Fi and whether in-room Wi-Fi is free. The report contains a global ranking and separate rankings for the United States, Europe and Asia.

Global rankings show Nordic Choice is the No. 1 chain in the global rankings, with 85 percent of its hotels offering adequate Wi-Fi and 100 percent of its hotels offering free Wi-Fi. Marriott International took the top spot in the United States, but the results were unimpressive when compared with the top hotel chains from the global chart. In addition, according to Hotel WiFi Test, only 17 percent of all Marriott hotels in the United States provide free Wi-Fi.

According to Hotel Wi-Fi Test, the chain to which a hotel belongs is one of the best predictors of Wi-Fi performance. Therefore, when travelers know how hotel chains are ranked overall, they can choose a specific hotel with better Wi-Fi even if they don’t have information about the Wi-Fi quality in that particular hotel.

In this report, a hotel judged as having adequate Wi-Fi must provide an expected download speed of at least 3 Mbps (the Netflix recommendation for SD-quality streaming) and an upload speed of 500 kbps (the Skype recommendation for high-quality, non-HD video calling). The Free Wi-Fi percentage is calculated as a ratio of hotels that offer free in-room Wi-Fi to all hotels for which the Wi-Fi price structure and availability is known.

For the full report, click here.