My Hilton Bayfront San Diego WiFi Experience

I was quite livid on Twitter when I found out that the Hilton San Diego Bayfront hotel did not offer complimentary WiFi. I was even more hacked when I saw that if I wanted WiFi, it would cost $19.99 for 24 hours. This is not Las Vegas in the early part of this decade, this is 2010. And in a major city. At a major hotel chain.

Anyway, I eventually had to fold and get the room WiFi for two big reasons:

1. A client project needed to be finished by early Monday morning.
2. I needed to check in my family to a favorable boarding group on Southwest; we ended up in Group B on our way out and didn’t get great seats.

At any rate, the base WiFi package that I had ordered included a whopping .95Mb/s bandwith cap (with options to upgrade to something twice as fast for an extra $6.00 per 24 hours).

I ran a speedtest of the line. Here’s the result:

 
Upon finally completing my transaction after a whole other ordeal, I was taken to a survey page.

Choice answers are below.

Under “Ease of getting connected,” I wrote:

I was trying to bill to a different credit card than the one on file, and wasn’t able to do so. I kept getting asked to enter a valid city — so I entered a combination of St. Louis, Saint Louis and St Louis — and was still blocked from proceeding. I reluctantly ended up billing to the room, which was – and let me be clear – NOT my intention, or preferred method of payment.

Under “Ease of use with navigating this web page,” I wrote:

Where should I begin? Perhaps you should hire a heuristics person, or do some basic usability testing. I am a web professional, so seeing such a poorly designed site makes me cringe.

Under “Speed of the internet connection,” I wrote:

This is the year 2010. 2011 is knocking on the calendar’s door. Having a .95Mb/s connection and considering it ‘basic’ is weaksauce. Charging an upgrade cost of $6 for 24 hours to glean maybe an extra Mb/s is highway robbery. You should be ashamed. To wit, have you or your staff even tried to WebEx with a connection this slow? I’m project managing a team of contractors in somewhat rural India that have a faster connection than this.

Finally, I was presented with the following screen. Here were the answers (mine should have been quite obvious):