Wi-Fi for hotels and hospitality
Guest Wi-Fi is one of the few pieces of building infrastructure that gets reviewed in public. It is also one of the most commonly under-designed, because the cheapest way to cover a hotel — access points in the corridor — is the one that guarantees complaints from the rooms furthest from them.
Why hotels are harder than their floor plans suggest
The corridor access point problem
Putting access points in corridors is attractive: the containment run is straightforward, there is no need to enter rooms, and a heatmap of the corridor looks excellent. The trouble is that no guest uses the corridor. Every room is served through at least one wall, and the guest at the far end of a room, in the bathroom, or in a corner suite is two or three walls away. Signal falls off, the device clings to a distant access point rather than roaming, and the guest — who has no visibility of any of this — writes that the Wi-Fi is poor.
In-room access points, or a mix of in-room and corridor, cost more to install and produce a categorically different experience. Which approach is right depends on the wall construction, the room layout and the guest expectation the property is selling, and that is a decision that should be made from measurements rather than from the installation cost.
Older buildings, thick walls and listed fabric
A large share of UK hotels are conversions or historic properties. Solid brick, stone, lath and plaster, thick party walls between rooms, and structural elements that have been there for two centuries all attenuate far more than a modern partition. Foil-backed insulation added during a refurbishment is a common and unadvertised culprit. Lift shafts, service risers and stair cores create dead zones in the middle of otherwise good coverage.
Listed status and conservation constraints then limit where anything can be fixed, what can be drilled and how cables can be routed, which makes the survey work harder and the design more important — there is far less room to correct a poor position later.
Guests are not managed clients
You do not control what a guest connects. Every device from a current phone to a decade-old tablet, a smart TV, a games console, a work laptop with a corporate VPN and a company-locked configuration. Some of them still use 2.4 GHz only. Some of them roam badly. All of them expect it to work in the time it takes to walk from the lift to the room, without instructions.
Onboarding is part of the experience
The captive portal is the first thing a guest interacts with and the most common source of friction. Portals that fail to launch, that require a room number and surname the guest has to go and find, that log people out overnight, that break the moment a device sleeps, or that do not work on a smart TV, produce complaints that read as coverage problems in a review but are not. Onboarding should be designed and tested on real device types, not assumed to work because the vendor demonstration worked.
Conference, function and event space
A function room is a warehouse-scale density problem in a hotel-sized footprint. Two hundred delegates arrive within a few minutes of each other, all connect, and a proportion of them expect to stream, present or run a video call. If a property sells conference space, that space needs designing for full occupancy — and the sale is frequently made on the strength of the Wi-Fi.
Back of house is a business network
PMS terminals, housekeeping devices, handheld ordering and payment terminals, kitchen displays, staff handsets and increasingly the door locks, thermostats and energy controls all depend on the same infrastructure. Guest and business traffic sharing a network without policy is how a busy Saturday night takes the card terminals down.
What we usually find
- Corridor-only coverage in a property with solid walls, with a predictable pattern of complaints from the rooms furthest from each access point.
- Access points added to fix complaints, one at a time, at maximum power, until the corridors are saturated and the network is slower than before anything was added.
- A portal nobody has tested on the devices guests bring. Works on a current phone, fails on a smart TV, a work laptop or an older tablet.
- Guest and back-of-house on the same network, with no bandwidth policy, so business traffic competes with guests streaming in their rooms.
- Function rooms served by the coverage that happened to reach them, then sold on the strength of the Wi-Fi.
- Uplink saturation blamed on the Wi-Fi. Perfectly good radio and an internet connection sized for a much older pattern of use — a hotel full of people streaming in the evening is a sustained load, not a bursty one.
- No coverage where guests actually sit. Terraces, gardens, courtyards, pool areas and the far end of the restaurant, none of which were in scope.
How we design a hotel
Measure the walls before deciding the topology
The in-room versus corridor decision is made from measured attenuation through the actual construction, room by room and wing by wing, because a property is rarely consistent — the original building and the extension will behave differently. An on-site survey in a sample of representative rooms produces that data, and it is the single most valuable measurement in a hotel project.
Design for the worst room, not the average one
The corner suite, the room at the end of the wing, the basement room, the room behind the lift shaft. Guests do not compare notes on which room got the good coverage; they each experience the room they were given. The design target is set by the least favourable room in the building.
Onboarding that works first time
Portal flow, authentication method, session length, reconnection behaviour, device-type handling and any tiering the property wants to offer, all specified and tested on the range of devices guests actually bring. Where the property has a loyalty scheme, PMS integration or a marketing requirement attached to the portal, that is designed in rather than bolted on. Whichever data the portal collects is a matter for the property's own privacy policy and should be reviewed against it before go-live.
Segregation and bandwidth policy
Guest, back-of-house, payment, building-services and staff traffic separated properly, with per-client bandwidth policy and airtime fairness so no single guest or device degrades the rest. Payment infrastructure has its own requirements and is designed to whatever standard the property's acquirer and PCI obligations impose — those requirements come from the property's own compliance position, and we design the network to meet what it is told.
Function and conference space designed for full occupancy
Modelled at the capacity the room is sold at, with high-density access point placement, mounting that suits the room's finishes and use, and — critically — uplink planning, because a full conference room can exhaust an internet connection that copes perfectly with a full hotel.
Outdoor and amenity areas
Terraces, gardens, courtyards, pool areas, car parks and marquee positions designed with external-rated hardware and proper containment. In hospitality these are frequently where guests spend the most time and where coverage was never provided.
Uplink and the honest conversation
If the internet connection is the constraint, more access points will not help and we will say so. A hotel's evening peak is sustained streaming from a high proportion of occupied rooms simultaneously, which is a very different profile from the connection sizing many properties inherited.
Delivering it in a trading hotel
Hotels do not close, and rooms out of service cost money every night.
- Wing by wing, floor by floor. Work planned around occupancy and the reservations team's forecast, so the minimum number of rooms are out at any point and they come back the same day wherever possible.
- Low-visibility working. Discreet access to guest areas, protection of finishes, and no plant or materials in front of guests. Corridors are cleared and made good before the next check-in.
- Containment and cabling in house. Cat6A and fibre to every access point position, terminated, tested and certified, with routes planned around listed fabric and conservation constraints. See structured cabling.
- Room-entry protocol agreed with housekeeping and duty management, with our people identifiable and supervised as the property requires.
- Out-of-hours where the area demands it — restaurants, bars, function space and reception, worked around the trading pattern rather than through it.
- Validated on completion, in the rooms as well as the corridors, and the evidence handed over.
Common questions
Do we need an access point in every room?
Sometimes, and it depends entirely on the wall construction, the room layout and the standard the property is selling. Solid masonry and older buildings push strongly towards in-room; lighter partitions may not need it. It is a decision that should come out of measured attenuation in representative rooms, not out of the installation cost.
Our guests complain even though the signal shows full bars. Why?
Signal strength is not throughput. Full bars with an exhausted uplink, a saturated channel, a device stuck on 2.4 GHz, or a portal session that has silently expired all produce the same indicator and a very different experience. Which of those it is can be measured.
Can we charge for a premium tier?
Yes. Tiered guest access with different bandwidth policies, and the portal flow to sell or unlock it, is a design decision we can build in. Whether it is a good commercial idea for your property is your call — it is increasingly out of step with guest expectation at some market positions and entirely normal at others.
We are a listed building. Is that a problem?
It is a constraint rather than a barrier, and one we plan around from the survey onwards: routes chosen to avoid new penetrations through protected fabric, existing services reused where possible, discreet mounting and finishes, and consent requirements factored into the programme rather than discovered mid-installation.
Can you cover the function rooms for conferences?
Yes, and they should be designed at the occupancy you sell them at rather than covered by whatever reaches them. That includes uplink planning — two hundred delegates arriving at once will find the limit of an internet connection that handles a full hotel comfortably.
Let's find out what your Wi-Fi is actually doing.
Book a survey and you get measured data, a design you can build to, and a number you can budget against — not an opinion.