Your hotel Wi-Fi is slow on purpose. Not always, and not everywhere, but far more often than the apology at the front desk suggests.

We've been picking apart hotel pricing for a while and the Wi-Fi tier is one of the more instructive things in the industry, because it's a rare case where the guest can see the whole business model working on them in real time. You connect, you get 2 Mbps, and a page appears offering you 25 Mbps for €9.99 a day. That page is the product.

The numbers behind the upgrade prompt

Consider a 200-room property at 70 percent occupancy. That's roughly 140 occupied rooms a night, call it 51,000 room-nights a year. If 30 percent of those guests take a premium internet upgrade at €9.99 a day, the property clears more than €150,000 a year from Wi-Fi alone.

Set that against what the bandwidth actually costs. A business fibre circuit sufficient for that property runs somewhere between €500 and €2,000 a month depending on the market. The access points, controllers and captive portal software are a one-time capital cost amortised over five to seven years. The marginal cost of moving a guest from the 2 Mbps tier to the 25 Mbps tier is, for practical purposes, nothing.

This is the highest-margin line item in the building. Higher than the minibar. Higher than parking. And unlike a resort fee, it doesn't show up in any of the junk-fee disclosure rules regulators have been tightening since 2025, because it's framed as an optional upgrade rather than a mandatory charge.

Why the free tier feels worse than 2 Mbps should

Here's the part that surprises people. The advertised speed of the free tier is frequently not the reason it's unusable.

Most hotel networks shape traffic per device rather than per room, and they apply that shaping unevenly. A family checking in with two phones, two tablets and a laptop takes five slots out of a pool sized for something closer to two devices per room. That assumption was set when hotel networks were specified, and device counts per guest have roughly tripled since.

Then there's the physical layer. Access points in older properties are commonly mounted in corridors rather than rooms, because corridor installation avoids running cable into every room during a refurbishment. Corridor placement means your signal crosses at least one wall, often a concrete or lath-and-plaster one, and in listed or older European buildings the losses are severe. The circuit into the building might be fine. The last twelve feet is what fails.

Finally, captive portals add latency independently of bandwidth. Every DNS lookup gets intercepted and inspected until you authenticate, and some portals keep inspecting afterwards. That's why hotel Wi-Fi can show a decent speed test result and still feel sluggish on a video call. Speed tests measure throughput. Video calls care about jitter and packet loss, which is what the shaping and the portal degrade.

What the loyalty tiers really do

Every major chain now uses Wi-Fi as a loyalty lever rather than a revenue line, which is a genuine improvement, though a partial one.

Hilton is the clearest example. Standard Wi-Fi is free to every Hilton Honors member who books through the brand, at any tier, including members with no status at all. Premium Wi-Fi stays a Diamond and Diamond Reserve benefit. The other majors run variations of the same structure. Free basic for members, faster tier for elites or for a fee.

The strategic point is that this converts a €9.99 charge into a reason to join the programme. The chain gives up the transaction revenue and gets a member record, an email address, and a booking channel it controls. For a large brand, that trade is obviously worth making. For an independent hotel with no loyalty programme to feed, it isn't, which is why independents and smaller groups are where you still hit hard paywalls.

What we expect to change, and what won't

Two forces are squeezing the paid tier. Regulatory attention on hidden and drip-priced fees keeps expanding, and while optional upgrades sit outside most current rules, the direction is clear. And guest expectation has moved. Business travellers now treat working video calls as a baseline requirement, not an amenity, and that shows up in review scores, which shows up in rate.

What won't change soon is the physical layer. Retrofitting in-room access points across an estate is a capital project competing with soft goods refurbishment, and it loses that argument most years. So even as the paywall disappears, plenty of properties will keep delivering internet that's free and still not good enough for a call.

That's the useful thing to know. Free does not mean fast, and paid does not mean fast either. What you're actually buying with a premium tier is a lifted per-device cap on a network that might be badly built anyway.

Getting a usable connection tonight

A few things reliably help, none of which involve paying.

Ask reception for a room near a corridor access point, or simply on a higher floor with fewer occupied rooms around it. Front desk staff often know which end of a floor is bad, because they hear about it daily.

Connect to the 5 GHz network rather than the 2.4 GHz one if both are broadcast. In a dense building 2.4 GHz is a traffic jam of every neighbouring device, microwave and Bluetooth speaker.

Disconnect devices you're not using. If the shaping is per device, five idle devices are still holding slots.

And check whether the property offers free premium to loyalty members. Signing up takes two minutes and at most chains gets you the standard free tier at minimum, sometimes the premium one.

Common questions

Why is hotel Wi-Fi so slow? Three reasons stack. Free tiers are deliberately rate-limited to sell upgrades, bandwidth is shaped per device on networks specified for far fewer devices per guest than people now carry, and access points are often mounted in corridors rather than rooms so the signal crosses walls.

Is paying for premium hotel Wi-Fi worth it? Only when the bottleneck is the rate limit rather than the physical network. Run a speed test on the free tier first. If you're getting the advertised free-tier speed cleanly, an upgrade will help. If you're getting far less than advertised, the problem is coverage and paying won't fix it.

Do hotel loyalty programmes include free Wi-Fi? At the major chains, yes for the standard tier. Hilton Honors members who book direct get standard Wi-Fi free at every status level, with premium reserved for Diamond and above. Most other large groups follow a similar split. Independents frequently have no free tier at all.

How much do hotels make from Wi-Fi? A 200-room property with 30 percent uptake of a €9.99 daily premium tier can clear over €150,000 a year, against bandwidth costs typically under €25,000. It's one of the highest-margin items in the building.

The short version

The free tier is a sales page and the premium tier is a lifted cap on a network that may be the real problem. Join the loyalty programme, use 5 GHz, ask for a room near an access point, and run a speed test before you pay for anything.

We spend our time at Best working out which parts of a hotel bill are cost and which parts are margin, because knowing the difference is what lets you avoid the second kind. More on that in our pieces on what hotels quietly removed from the room rate and why minibars are disappearing.

Images: Hotel room desk via Pexels. Lobby interiors via Pixabay. Used under their respective free licences.