Hotelwifitest.com has released a new report that ranks hotel chains and cities by the percentage of hotels with poor WiFi performance. This type of ranking makes perfect sense from a practical standpoint. For most travelers, having super-fast and consistently stable WiFi is a great bonus, but the first priority is ensuring that the basic quality expectations for Internet access are met.

In this report, a hotel judged as having adequate WiFi must provide an expected download speed of at least 2Mbps, an upload speed of 1Mbps, latency not exceeding 500ms, and an average stability rating of at least 3 out of 5. Upload testing, latency testing, and stability feedback are relatively new additions to the testing process; therefore, for some hotels, download speed was the only factor being measured. Furthermore, this report does not differentiate between paid and free WiFi.

The chain of a hotel is one of the best predictors of WiFi performance. Also, travelers can usually choose their preferred hotel chain in a given area or city. The first table of this report presents the 20 most tested hotel chains and ranks them by their percentage of hotels with poor WiFI.

Table 1. 20 most tested hotel chains ranked by their percentage of hotels with poor WiFi — Photo by Hotelwifitest.comTable 1. 20 most tested hotel chains ranked by their percentage of hotels with poor WiFi — Photo by Hotelwifitest.com
Table 1. 20 most tested hotel chains ranked by their percentage of hotels with poor WiFi — Photo by Hotelwifitest.com

Travelers who want to minimize their chances of having poor hotel WiFi ruin their online experience should choose hotel chains closer to the top of the table.

The second table ranks the most tested cities worldwide by the same criteria.

Source: Hotelwifitest.comSource: Hotelwifitest.com
Source: Hotelwifitest.com
Table 2. 20 most tested cities ranked by their percentage of hotels with poor WiFi — Photo by Hotelwifitest.comTable 2. 20 most tested cities ranked by their percentage of hotels with poor WiFi — Photo by Hotelwifitest.com
Table 2. 20 most tested cities ranked by their percentage of hotels with poor WiFi — Photo by Hotelwifitest.com

For most travelers, changing their destination city is not an option, but this information can still act as a friendly warning, a suggestion to spend more time reading hotel reviews, and a strong recommendation to book an accommodation property with tested WiFi, if possible.

This report provides valuable advice for choosing a hotel based on chains and global destinations. However, it is always better to check WiFi quality before booking a hotel. In some cities, this is very easy to do: there are 180 tested hotels in New York alone; 42 of them have an expected speed of more than 10Mbps.

About Hotel WiFi Test

With hotels tested in more than 4,000 cities worldwide and more than 250 hotels tested in New York (Manhattan) alone, Hotel WiFi Test is the leader in collecting, analyzing, and distributing hotel Wi-Fi data from around the world. It was listed as one of the 50 Best Websites for 2014 by Time magazine. Data on hotels' Wi-Fi quality is crowd-sourced, processed, and then made available for free to all travelers on hotelwifitest.com and on third-party travel websites via the content API. The company releases quarterly reports about different aspects of hotel Wi-Fi. The latest report ranks cities, countries, and world regions by their hotels' Wi-Fi quality.