WARNING TO TRAVELERS: Once again I’ve found that I paid to stay at a hotel and found that the high-speed Internet doesn’t work and the wireless Internet won’t connect. This time it’s at a Best Western — a hotel chain I’ve had particular Internet connection troubles with and probably will sadly have to avoid in the future if I need a place where I can get online from my hotel room.
(When I called Best Western customer service the service rep stressed that each hotel is “independently owned and operated” — which means I simply can’t risk staying at one anymore if I know I NEED to get on the Internet and do work in my room. Presumably the corporation spends money on their name as a brand name and would want to ensure business travelers don’t have bad experiences.)
Since starting this blog, I’ve stayed at motels a bit better than I would normally do because I choose hotels that advertise high-speed internet or wireless. I’m finding a lot of them say they have it and really don’t. (Sorry, inviting someone to hook up to a line in the lobby isn’t worth the extra money…)
Monday night I stayed at the Super 8 in Commerce City, which had a great connections. Super 8s generally have good wireless or decent dial up and are highly recommended if you’re on a budget. This hotel’s dial-up has been snail-paced and disconnected twice. The hotel itself is lovely and the staff are helpful. Its internet is almost useless…and I came here assuming (based on its info on the Internet) I could get connected.
I will try to post a bit tonight but I may not be post much until tomorrow afternoon.
PS: At many hotels I get 40 kpbs on my Cox dial-up which is what I’m now using. My first connection was 7 kpbs. This is 14 kpbs. (I have tried and am now giving up trying to post beyond this message which has taken 30 minutes to do so far).
UPDATE:
(1) I can’t get into my GMAIL from this hotel. This means I cannot answer bloggers, email cobloggers on this site or use some material that I planned to put on this site today.
(2) I will try to get to a Starbucks this morning but there’s no guarantee (to answer blog and business emails that I cannot access from this big-mistake hotel).
(3) Please keep checking back for posts from cobloggers on this site.
UPDATE: The connection is too slow on dial-up for spell-check to work. If there are errors, sorry!
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.