I was just about to start crowing over how I haven’t paid for internet access since I arrived in the Bay area last Tuesday — the ratty old Best Western in Mountain View had free wired access as well as being in the Google wifi zone, and the Hilton in San Francisco’s financial district doesn’t charge for wifi, the first Hilton that I’ve ever been in that didn’t — but I’ve arrived at the Hyatt Regency near San Francisco airport for the BPM Think Tank conference and find myself having to buy access through T-mobile.
When are the organizers of technology conferences going to start to insist on only booking at hotels with free internet access? When that starts becoming a competitive differentiator for their bread-and-butter conference bookings, the hotels will start to listen.