Hotelwifitest.com Focuses on Poor WiFi: If Holiday Inn Express was a City, it Would be Las Vegas

NEW YORK, August 13, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --

Hotelwifitest.com has released a new report that ranks hotel chains and cities by the percentage of hotels with poor WiFi performance. This type of ranking makes perfect sense from a practical standpoint. For most travelers, having super-fast and consistently stable WiFi is a great bonus, but the first priority is ensuring that the basic quality expectations for Internet access are met.

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In this report, a hotel judged as having adequate WiFi must provide an expected download speed of at least 2Mbps, an upload speed of 1Mbps, latency not exceeding 500ms, and an average stability rating of at least 3 out of 5. Upload testing, latency testing, and stability feedback are relatively new additions to the testing process; therefore, for some hotels, download speed was the only factor being measured. Furthermore, this report does not differentiate between paid and free WiFi.

The chain of a hotel is one of the best predictors of WiFi performance. Also, travelers can usually choose their preferred hotel chain in a given area or city. The first table of this report presents the 20 most tested hotel chains and ranks them by their percentage of hotels with poor WiFi.

Table 1. 20 most tested hotel chains ranked by their percentage of hotels with poor WiFi 

    Rank Chain                     Hotels with poor WiFi (%)
    1    Radisson Blu              17
    2    Hyatt Hotels & Resorts    34
    3    Quality Inn               35
    4    Best Western              35
    5    Sheraton Hotels & Resorts 36
    6    Marriott Hotels & Resorts 40
    7    Mercure Hotels            42
    8    Crowne Plaza              45
    9    Westin Hotels & Resorts   45
    10   Hilton Hotels & Resorts   46
    11   Courtyard by Marriott     50
    12   Comfort Inn               51
    13   Doubletree                54
    14   Residence Inn             55
    15   Holiday Inn Express       56
    16   Holiday Inn               62
    17   Novotel                   67
    18   Hampton Inn               83
    19   Hilton Garden Inn         83
    20   Homewood Suites           90

Travelers who want to minimize their chances of having poor hotel WiFi ruin their online experience should choose hotel chains closer to the top of the table.

The second table ranks the most tested cities worldwide by the same criteria.

Table 2. 20 most tested cities ranked by their percentage of hotels with poor WiFi 

    Rank City           Country              Hotels with poor WiFi (%)
    1    Stockholm      Sweden               4
    2    Hong Kong      Hong Kong            8
    3    Amsterdam      Netherlands          17
    4    Tokyo          Japan                19
    5    Rome           Italy                27
    6    Dubai          United Arab Emirates 29
    7    London         United Kingdom       30
    8    Berlin         Germany              31
    9    San Diego      United States        33
    10   Barcelona      Spain                35
    11   Washington     United States        37
    12   Singapore      Singapore            38
    13   Chicago        United States        38
    14   Vienna         United States        40
    15   Bangkok        Thailand             41
    16   New York       United States        41
    17   Orlando        United States        44
    18   San Francisco  United States        48
    19   Paris          France               53
    20   Las Vegas      United States        57

For most travelers, changing their destination city is not an option, but this information can still act as a friendly warning, a suggestion to spend more time reading hotel reviews, and a strong recommendation to book an accommodation property with tested WiFi, if possible.

This report provides valuable advice for choosing a hotel based on chains and global destinations. However, it is always better to check WiFi quality before booking a hotel. In some cities, this is very easy to do: there are 180 tested hotels in New York alone; 42 of them have an expected speed of more than 10Mbps.

SOURCE Hotel WiFi Test