Re: [LUG] Hotel Logging in Management

On 11 June 2013 06:41, Simon Avery <digdilem@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

As a very occasional user of such things; please provide it free to use. Password nailed up in reception or in the room. Some bandwidth may be useful if there are many guests. Wifi is the FIRST thing I look for when booking a room. If it's not mentioned and free, I go elsewhere.

Strongle suggest avoiding the commercial outsourcing partners. They may do it for free, but they will milk the customer. See Travelodge (an extra £10-£15 per 24 hours (?)) and Premier Inn (something like £6 per night). Registration and key cards required, lots of faff. Go to a small B&B and get it for free with lower contention.

Catch and release/captive portal may be required for fully open systems where you *may* be obligated to make an effort to get personal details of the users if later the law come knocking on your door because of something they did online (IANAL, and when I did look into it was given much conflicting advice and walked away more confused than before I started looking).

However, hotels already have that, so why require it again and frustrate the guests? I rate hotels lower that provide crap/restricted wifi online via the booking agencies, and most owners consider online reviews critical so why take the risk?

(On a practical level, multiple waps are probably inevitable, but no special setup needed)

If the hotel in question has only a fairly limited number of rooms, then would it not be plausible to create a transparent proxy that is password protected, has a limited number of password - one for each room/guest - which could be generated/tied in with the booking details? It wouldn't even need to be particularly fancy - just a record of "this password was for this room on this date", so it could cleanly tie-in with their existing room records.

Grant.