Red Room Chronicles

So says Shel Holtz on his Road Weary travel blog. Seems he got lots of great service at the Marriott Skydome in Toronto, but there was one major problem.

According to Shel’s post, “I noticed earlier that spam-like banner ads were showing up in my browser. I would navigate to a page that I knew had no ads, and one would appear anyway, mostly touting online poker. Curious, I clicked on over to my own blog, and the same ad showed up there.”

Seems that Shel’s browser was being hijacked by the hotel internet service.  You might assume that this type of thing is used to subsidize a free service. Not so. Shel was paying $12.95 a day for the access.

The lesson here is simple. When people are paying for internet access they should get a higher level of service. That includes the option of a wired connection and no extra ads included in the browser. Internet access is important enough to me that I have started making booking decisions based on what I know about a particular hotel’s level of service vis-a-vis the internet.

Hopefully Marriott will get the message and adjust their services accordingly.