It used to be more common about 10 years ago, but especially so among hotels catering to business travel. Your Motel 6 would probably have free wifi, the Hilton wanted an extra $20 a night.

It's a business hotel thing, oddly all the cheap chains will have free breakfast and wifi, but often something like the Hilton will be pay for both, likely because the clientele they're targeting is business employees who will just expense the whole thing.

Conference hotels often soak the companies with booths for internet access. One place I did for my company demanded $1500 for 3 days of internet access for up to 5 devices.

In-room, you get free internet access, but in the windowless ballroom with spotty cell-service, there's nothing available for free.

I’ve also seen the opposite, where in-room Wi-Fi was charged, but in the hotel’s function spaces, it was free. The economics of this are confusing, at best. I have also had the situation where the in-room wi-fi was so slow that using my phone as a hot spot was faster!

If they give you free internet in your room, you won't pay for their pay-TV. Especially the kind you won't be watching in public areas.

"Follow the money"

Sometimes that because the operator got hosed in a contract with a network provider. I used to see that a lot in full service hotels.

It used to be common everywhere.

From my point of view, free WiFi became normal when it became less important because of affordable mobile internet.

From the point of view of the hotels it was about recovering their missing income after customers got mobile phones and stopped paying half a dollar per minute for using the hotel phones. There was a period when both mobile roaming and hotel WiFi was expensive, so I often went out from my hotel room and bough a local SIM-card to get internet access.

What annoys me most, is that only when I finally could get a laptop that would work a full transatlantic flight on one charge, then suddenly airplanes all got power outlets.

Yes. You often also have to pay for parking in many places. The price you see online is rarely what you pay for. But that's part of the culture, it's the same for restaurants, online purchases etc.

The sticker price is almost never what you pay, since tax is almost never included. Not sure how or when that norm diverged from the Euro one.

I suspect the "how" is that we just never got the regulation that would prevent it because the 'small-government and low taxes' are aligned perfectly with the large business interests which tend to fund all campaigns. The "low taxes" types want to maximize the sting of all forms of tax and this is a great way to do that. And the businesses appreciate the psychological benefits of being able to show the minimum possible number. Even if a "display only the final price" rule applied to all a consumer's options, we probably just buy things more when they're labeled as "$99.99" instead of "$109.99."

For extra fun, consider how phone bills attempt to "pass through" their own tax obligations, which have little to do with your own incremental usage, in the form of 'recovery fees' tacked onto bills. I suspect we'll eventually see those creep into all kinds of transactions, especially among other monopolistic/oligopoly businesses where you have little if any choice.

> we probably just buy things more when they're labeled as "$99.99" instead of "$109.99."

That's basic price elasticity of demand and entirely unsurprising. When something costs 10% more, people buy less of it in general.

We also buy more things priced at $99.99 than at $100.00, which is more of the psychological trick than it is rational price elasticity.

The 2 largest retailers on earth have discovered that the x.99 prices make you less money than pricing at x.99 plus some arbitrary number between .99 and .01.

I think the EU law on that is the "Price indication directive", and AFAIK, it's been around since 1998. (may have replaced an earlier directive, my google-fu is lacking)

I think the norm is to show whatever price you want, with some countries banning that for fairly obvious reasons.

I’m imaging it’s because states and even cities can have differing sales tax rates.

Hard to advertise to a wide audience when the final price after tax is one of 12 different prices depending on where they live.

That's a weak justification to apply to prices listed right where the product is sold. Like, if one uses a sticker gun to put a price tag on a product itself.

I don't know of any US businesses other than waffle house that always include all taxes in the listed price, however.

There are laws against adding in taxes on listed prices in places like NJ, likely others as well.

Regardless, I'm not sure why people consider it such a big deal. It's consistent across the board and it's relatively basic math to estimate what the total would be.

I've lived in places that do it both ways and it's a non-issue.

Thankfully competition from AirBNB made them re-think the idea. That's my theory why it mostly went away anyway.

There's still some stragglers though, offering "basic" access free but charging for higher data limits, faster bandwidth, more devices. You can often get the higher plan just by signing up for the hotel's loyalty program.

It's not unheard of but it's probably been a decade since I've been to one personally. Some have free WiFi just for guests (probably good since the bandwidth is so saturated already).

The last couple of hotels I stayed in had free "basic" wifi for guests. Elite status could get higher speeds for free or anyone else could pay something like $10/day/device to get higher speeds.

I just switched to my cell phone data if the wifi was too slow.

Dialup speeds is free, but if you want to taste those megabytes, you better fork over those megabucks.