Opinion: Be wary of the travel industry
By Christopher Elliott, Washington Post
It’s for your own good.
Travelers are hearing these words more often than ever, and they are being applied to increasingly unwelcome scenarios. The latest example: being unable to access WiFi in your hotel without incurring an added charge. In August, the American Hotel & Lodging Association and Marriott filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission asking the government for permission to block wireless devices in hotels.
Marriott, you might recall, last year paid a $600,000 fine for allegedly interfering with its guests’ personal wireless hotspots at one of its large convention properties. The hotel chain argued that its having the authority to disrupt these connections would make customers less vulnerable to hackers and “unauthorized network access.”
In other words, the chain wants to jam your cellular hotspot for your own good.
The hotels fail to mention, of course, that they’d also earn a bundle by charging guests for access when they can’t use their own wireless devices to connect to the Internet.
Airlines, car rental companies and cruise lines are using similar rhetoric to push their own agendas. Customers have come to expect such obfuscation that some travel companies have built their business on opting for straight talk. But with a little digging, you can always unearth the truth and maybe keep your vacation budget in check.
The myriad problems of capitalism are the tides of economics. They ebb and flow with the consumer being nothing but a piece of flotsam on the sea. The ideals of this great country are trampled upon whenever a company takes advantage of a citizen to increase profits in an unfair or abusive way. There is a balance that a free country must attempt to maintain but scoundrels and scofflaws will always be there to abuse the freedom that this great country offers to us. It is still the best system devised so far, IMHO.
There are those currently who use our freedom against us and claim that it is for our own good, while they abuse the freedoms to distort and obfuscate truth. But they will be swept away with the tide, and we await the tides…
dumb, that was a great way to put it.
Bad policy saying that it is because they fear that it leaves their system open to hackers. It leaves the customers questioning the security of the companies WIFI. In other words the company doesn’t believe its security isn’t any good so I should not use their system. Any user of WIFi should know that most Wifi systems are very unreliable for security and shouldn’t use it for any type of very personal information.