Right now your Wi-Fi gives strangers free internet and gives you nothing. Guest Wi-Fi for a café, a bar or a restaurant can do better than that. Swap the chalkboard password for a sign-in page with your name on it: customers tap Google or leave an email, they're online in seconds, and every single day you're open your mailing list grows. That is Wi-Fi marketing, and it happens while you serve.
No hotel software, no new equipment for most venues. Send us a photo of your Wi-Fi box and we'll confirm.
The password on the chalkboard works for everyone: the customer buying lunch, the person nursing one coffee for four hours, and whoever's sitting on the bench outside. You pay the bill, they get the bandwidth, and at the end of the month you know precisely nothing about any of them.
Before: "Wi-Fi: kopiteduh2024 (please don't share)"
After: "Welcome back, Sarah — you're already connected."
Not bought, not scraped, not guessed. Every address belongs to someone who sat in your place. Addresses are checked for typos and fakes before they're kept, so what you collect is worth mailing.
Export the list, or connect the mailing tool you already use. A weekend event, a new menu, happy hour, sent to people who've been in before, which is exactly who comes back.
Two free hours then ask again. Faster speeds at breakfast, tighter at peak. A separate, better plan for staff. Set it once in a dashboard you'll understand in about a minute.
Someone who signed in last week isn't asked to do it again: their phone reconnects and they're online. The welcome gets warmer, not more annoying.
More than one venue? Run them all from one login, each with its own look and rules. Per-venue pricing →
A hotel takes a name, a passport and a card at the front desk, and its Wi-Fi sign-in only has to ask which room. A café is the opposite. Somebody walks in, orders, sits, pays and leaves, and nothing in the till has the faintest idea who they were. The best-run café in town, at the end of its best year, can name perhaps twenty regulars.
Signing in to the Wi-Fi is the one moment in a walk-in business when a customer volunteers who they are, in exchange for something they actually want. That is the whole opportunity, and it lasts about four seconds.
It also means you get to ask, which a hotel does not. A guest signing in with a room number is asked nothing else, because the property already knows them. Your customer is a stranger, so when they tap Google or Apple you may put a question or two in front of them before they are let on: a birthday for the birthday email, which of your places they are in most, how they heard about you. Short, optional where you want it optional, and answered while the page is still loading.
And the follow-up is a different business entirely. A hotel emails a guest who is now in another country. You email somebody who is fifteen minutes away and has to eat lunch today.
name · surname · room · nationality · arrival · departure · the booking it all hangs off
nothing
A card payment names a card, not a customer, and you cannot email a card. This is the gap the sign-in page closes.
Your card terminal belongs to the bank. Your delivery orders belong to the delivery app, which will not tell you a customer's name and will happily sell them a discount at the place across the road. Your followers belong to whichever platform is having a good year. A list of people who have sat in your place, with their permission to write to them, is the only one of those you can take with you: to a new site, to a second venue, or into a sale.
Which is why it matters that what goes on it is real. We have installed this kind of sign-in page in a number of hotels, and somewhere between a third and a half of the addresses collected were junk: mistyped, invented on the spot, or a throwaway account somebody keeps for exactly this. Two thousand addresses of which eight hundred bounce is not a list of two thousand. It is a list of twelve hundred, and a sending reputation you have quietly damaged.
So an address is checked as it arrives: the format, the obvious typo, whether the domain accepts mail at all, whether it is a known disposable service, and then confirmed by the customer clicking. Nobody is ever refused Wi-Fi over a bad address; it simply never reaches the list. A customer who taps Google or Apple has skipped the problem altogether, because the address comes from the account rather than from a thumb on a wet phone.
Wi-Fi marketing running on a list half of which does not exist is not marketing. It is postage.
How addresses are checked → · What Wi-Fi marketing needs from you →
Every café owner has had this conversation and nobody enjoys it. One flat white, seven hours, the good seat, and a member of your staff having to decide whether to say something. A password on a chalkboard gives you no way to answer it except in person.
A time limit does the same job without anybody having to be the villain. Two hours, then the sign-in page comes back, which most people read as their cue, and which somebody genuinely working through the afternoon can simply accept again if that is what you want. It is your house rule, applied by the equipment rather than by whoever drew the short straw.
The same setting is how you tell a Tuesday morning from a Saturday night: generous when the room is empty, tighter when there is a queue at the door. How long, how fast and how many devices one person may bring are all yours to set, and staff can have their own better plan so the card terminal and the tablet at the pass are never competing with the room.
None of this is about being mean with the internet. It is about the Wi-Fi behaving like part of the business rather than like a tap somebody left running.
how long a session lasts · how fast it is · how many devices per person · whether it may be renewed · a separate plan for staff
walk over and ask somebody to leave
A customer joining your Wi-Fi is giving you their whole attention for a few seconds, more attention than your A-board, your table cards and your last four posts put together. You can put a screen in front of the sign-in and use it.
A photo, or a short silent video with a still frame behind it. A headline, a few lines, a short list of the details, and one button with whatever wording you like on it. It appears before the sign-in, so everybody who connects goes through it.
The Friday band. Two for one on the terrace until seven. The new menu. Kitchen open until eleven. The quiz. Anything you are currently relying on a chalkboard and a hopeful glance to communicate.
It arrives switched off. Turn it on for the week of the event and off again afterwards, or leave it up permanently with your opening hours on it. Changing it takes a minute and involves nobody but you.
An email waits in a crowded inbox and a post waits for an algorithm. This is on the phone of somebody already sitting in your room, deciding what to order next.
Most cafés and bars are on Ubiquiti UniFi, TP-Link Omada, a single MikroTik hAP, Aruba Instant On, a standalone TP-Link EAP, Grandstream GWN, EnGenius Cloud. Each has its own page saying what it can do, what has to be true before an installer starts, and what catches people out. If you are buying, the sizing guides for MikroTik, UniFi and Omada say which model a room this size needs.
None of these are about Wi-Fi equipment. They are about tables, customers and quiet Tuesdays.
One coffee, one laptop, the best seat, nine till five. Let the equipment have the awkward conversation.
Every “what’s the Wi-Fi?” interrupts a sale, and the password ends up on the bench outside.
You cannot email a card payment. The four seconds when a walk-in tells you who they are.
Reviews are written by the annoyed unless everybody gets asked.
The A-board faces the wrong way and Instagram showed it to eleven people.
Set it up yourself this week, or send us that photo of your Wi-Fi box and we'll tell you exactly what's involved.
