Shoppers and Hotels Patrons Want Wi-Fi – and Hughes Can Help You Deliver

At Hughes, we know how much Wi-Fi matters – not just to customers and guests but to business as well.

We recently conducted a survey that revealed just how important Wi-Fi is to shoppers and hotel guests. Two-thirds said free Wi-Fi was a deciding factor when deciding where to eat or drink, 59 per cent said it was a priority when choosing a hotel and 46 per cent said it plays a large role in deciding which shops to enter.

It’s clear that providing Wi-Fi has become essential to meeting customers’ expectations, but it’s not just Wi-Fi they want; it’s Wi-Fi that works all the time.

These results may not be shocking considering how much time people spend on their smartphones when out and about. In fact, 69 per cent of consumers said they always have their smartphone’s Wi-Fi turned on while shopping.

In hospitality, 80 per cent of guests use hotel Wi-Fi for browsing the internet, 51 per cent use it for social media and 60 per cent use it to research the area and plan their trip. This makes Wi-Fi a vital tool.

However, many consumers are concerned about the quality of their connectivity. 56 per cent of consumers want Wi-Fi to be faster, 54 per cent want to be able to connect all the time and 47 per cent simply want it to be easier to access.

When thinking of Wi-Fi, businesses must also consider capacity, ensuring it is reliable, secure and fast enough to meet customer expectations. This can be difficult to achieve without the proper expertise and focus of a managed services provider like Hughes, without whom retailers will only leave customers and staff alike frustrated.

This is where Hughes comes in. As a managed services provider, Hughes has the knowledge and experience necessary to build a solution that matches retailers’ requirements precisely, making Wi-Fi deliver.

In retail, one of the most popular applications Hughes can enable is the ability for retailers to send eye-catching and timely offers and promotions straight to shoppers via their smartphones. Meanwhile, technology retailers can allow shoppers to access the detailed information on big-ticket items that they crave, and could otherwise only find at home online. By requiring customers to log in to Wi-Fi through social media, retailers can gain their own benefits, such as valuable demographic information that can be used to tailor personalised promotional material.

Businesses can also use Wi-Fi to learn more about how their floor-space is used. Technology that tracks smartphones from Wi-Fi access points can indicate peaks in footfall and give retailers the ability to open up more tills at the right time to cut queueing.

Above all else the survey has shown how Wi-Fi is a customer-facing technology that should be installed and maintained as a vital necessity. That means using an experienced managed services provider like Hughes to install and maintain the technology best suited to each retailer or hospitality operator’s needs, with upgrades as required.

Working with Hughes means attracting more customers and guests, meeting all their data requirements and keeping them on the premises for longer, free, resilient Wi-Fi that can deliver many benefits, not least to the bottom line.