This is a pet peeve story.
Up to early 2007, free wifi signals dotted the urban landscape of San Francisco and one could just park the car, open the laptop and voila! be on. Now, people have figured out how to set up WEP passwords due to the imagined threat of "drive-by" spammers who, as urban myth has it, find a free wifi signal to unleash their spam distribution. We had grown accustomed to wifi being like electricity... open and free.
I (and I'm sure countless others) mentally note every free wifi coffee shop in the neighborhoods where we have meetings so we can refer to them immediately. These shops always get my business. Coffee shop owners complain of wifi-loungers, so they should do what this brilliant bakery chain Panera Bread does - they offer free wifi except between the lunch hours of 11:00 - 2:00 when wifi use is restricted and clocked to 30 minutes. Panera is my meeting spot of choice whenever I'm in SoCal. Every restaurant chain should do this.
Booking a conference at a hotel expecting a reasonable price for a conference wifi setup? At the Marriott Irvine, $300 + $50 per hookup... for 100 people on the internet, that's $5,300.... no wonder conference organizers are so stingy with their login/passwords. Anyone out there who can connect me to a hotel sales manager in Orange County? I'm serious... any hotel that gives me a reasonable wifi deal gets all my business.
There is a new attitude, a shift in consciousness, that the internet age has engendered. With the social expectation, even obligation of data democracy and the inherent generosity that such distribution entails, society rankles at any obvious overcharges. We all condemn the $3.00 per minute hotel phone long distance charges of yesteryear, so when we encounter Starbucks charging $10 per day for wifi, we put Starbucks on our personal blacklist. Can't corporations see this new branding challenge? I subconsciously hate Starbucks and condemn them viciously in my search for a Panera, despite my preference for Starbucks coffee. If I were a brand manager, I would strengthen my brand by eliminating any product or practice that would be perceived negatively by my customer.
I think I'm a typical consumer with this atttude. The lesson for real estate - generosity of data. Make it easy for your potential client to get real estate information they want (as in a blog) first... don't force them to sit through an interview like a 2-hour time share sales pitch to get that information. It makes them resentful.
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Panera is doing things right! Starbucks' charge of $10 for WiFi has become a profit point, even though they originally told the consumer it was a necessity to "cover costs".
Hotel chains are among the worst offenders in this regard. Of the past three or four hotels where I've stayed on business, what I encountered when trying to use the Internet in my room (or in any part of the building) was a poor signal, inconvenience and sometimes high cost as well.