Yahoo Brings Free Wifi to Sheraton Hotels
Sick of paying an extra $10 or so for hotel broadband Internet access? Yahoo and Sheraton’s parent company, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc., are pairing up to bring free hotel wifi to patrons. The Wall Street Journal reports that Yahoo and Sheraton are testing some wifi lounges at the hotels, dubbed Yahoo Link@Sheraton.
Seeking new ways to distinguish their respective brands, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. and Yahoo Inc. said they will begin a test of Yahoo Internet lounges in two Sheraton hotels today.
Dubbed Yahoo Link@Sheraton, the lounges opening today in the lobbies of the Sheraton Boston and Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina will be part business center, part Internet cafe. They will have desktop workstations and space for guests to plug in laptop computers. Internet access, including wireless capability, will be free, the companies said.
Personally I would rather have the free wifi access in my room and not in some lobby lounge instead of having to go down to the lobby in the middle of the night to check my email or whatever, but this is a step in the positive direction for larger hotel chains. Of course, a lot of smaller independent hotels have been offering their own wifi access in an attempt to get a leg up on their competition, for a list of some of the chains doing so try Wifi Freespot
Aaron Wall at Threadwatch wonders if these Yahoo and Google partnerships are a sign of things to come for municipality wifi “Makes me wonder if the free WiFi initiatives will end up being mainly municipal based or partnerships between various corporations.”
