Every platform in this market has a comparison page ranking itself first. This is not one of those. It is the five questions that separate the platforms, written so you can put them to anyone, including us, and the honest answer to each from this side of the table.
By Mark Townsend, founder of Resort Manager Solutions and author of IT in Hospitality.
A branded sign-in page. A list of who signed in. Something sent to the list. Every vendor does all three, most of them well, and a page that pretends otherwise is not being straight with you. Several also do room-and-surname sign-in for hotels, several ship a plug-in box, and most publish a guide arguing that Wi-Fi marketing is worth it. Take that as the baseline: the shape is the same, and the differences are in five specific places.
Some platforms run on enterprise access points and turn away MikroTik, TP-Link and the other makes a café or a small guesthouse actually has. Others ship their own box and run on that. Ask for the list of supported makes, and ask what each one can and cannot do, because “supported” ranges from every feature to a branded page and nothing else. Our answer: forty makes, each with its own page saying exactly that. The list →
If the answer is an email address and a consent box, the platform was built for a shop and is treating a guest who showed a passport at your desk an hour ago as a stranger. Room number and surname, checked against the front-desk system, with access that ends at checkout, is the hotel answer. Ask which front-desk systems connect and how quickly a check-in reaches the Wi-Fi. Our answer: room and surname; Resort Manager as it happens, Opera, Mews, Cloudbeds and Protel within minutes. How it works →
The most useful question in this market and the least asked. We have installed this kind of sign-in page in a number of hotels, and somewhere between a third and a half of the typed addresses were junk. A vendor who has never measured it is selling you a list size, not a list. Ask what is checked before an address is kept. Our answer: format, typo, whether the domain accepts mail, whether it is a disposable service, then a confirmation click; a Google or Apple tap skips the problem. The honest version of Wi-Fi marketing →
Some platforms ask a guest for a score first and send only the happy ones to Google. That is review gating; it breaches Google’s and TripAdvisor’s rules, and the score it builds is not the one the review sites are measuring. Ask the question plainly and listen for the word “filter”. Our answer: everyone who responds is offered the same public link; a low score alerts the manager. Why the Wi-Fi shows up in reviews →
Most vendors answer with GDPR. Indonesia asks for five years of connection records and a notice in Bahasa; Thailand for ninety days with the right time on them. A vendor who does not know the answer for your country will default to ninety days and never mention it, and the property, not the vendor, holds the gap. Our answer: pick the country at setup and the retention period follows. Country by country →
No sign-in page fixes a signal that stops at the pool bar. Ask whether the vendor will design a network from your plans and specify the equipment, or only post a box. Our answer: we design it and specify it; for a small venue we buy the kit, configure it and post it ready to plug in; a local contractor pulls the cable to our drawing. The beach-club case →
A chain of a hundred venues wanting footfall analytics and a data warehouse. The enterprise platforms are built for that and we are not; buy one of them. A venue that wants to charge guests for Wi-Fi. The product can, but the site argues against it and the roadmap does not favour it; a vendor who leads with paid tiers will serve you better. A property whose front-desk system will never share who is staying. You lose the room sign-in and the checkout cut-off, and a café-style platform at a café price does everything else.
The one whose answers to five questions you have checked: whether it runs on the equipment you already own, whether a hotel guest signs in with room number and surname or is asked for an email, what proportion of captured addresses bounce, whether review requests are filtered, and what the country’s retention law is and whether the vendor knows. No list on the internet can answer those for your property. A demo on your own phone can.
Only if your network is the problem. Most venues already have equipment that supports a branded sign-in page, and a vendor who insists on shipping a box is selling the box. Where coverage genuinely is the problem, at a resort with villas or a beach club, you need somebody who will survey and install a network, which is a different job from posting a device.
Read what the free plan captures. Several vendors’ free tiers give a branded page and network statistics and no guest list; the list starts at a paid tier that is not priced on the page. A free plan that captures nothing is a router feature with a logo on it.
Ask for the total for one venue, one year, with the list, the email follow-up and the connector to your mailing tool included. Vendors price those three differently, and the headline figure rarely includes all three. Then ask what happens to the price when a busy month puts you over a guest count.
One question: does every guest who responds get the public review link, whatever they scored? If the answer involves routing unhappy guests somewhere private first, the score the platform builds is not the score the review sites are measuring, and it breaches their rules.
Tell us the property and what the Wi-Fi runs on. You will get the same answers as above, on your own phone, against a real guest list.
