It is with a bit of irony that I enter the blogosphere to share some of the trials and tribulations, and rewards, of being a person on the move traveling around the world.
I travel a lot and I have to be connected to the Internet for my work while on the road. This means that when I take accommodation, the first thing I look at is if they have Wifi or an Internet connection.
It can always be tricky finding what you need. Hotels often misrepresent the level of connectivity they can provide to you.
This week a business colleague and I were supposed to spend one week on a work retreat in Scotland. I had arrived from Canada in London, UK, and after a few days we set out by car from London to the city of Dunfermline to the north of Edinburgh. The trip was a long, boring run up the M6 that normally takes around 8 hours and 694 km (431 miles). That does not take in the mistake we made that cost us an extra 2 hours of driving.
Not a fan of chain hotels, we anyways booked accommodation at a Holiday Inn Express because the price was right and the Internet connection guaranteed. The most important thing was to be away and to be able to work online.
Arriving mid-evening, after checking in we quickly dropped our bags and getting something to eat, we came back to the hotel to check our Internet connection.
First of all we found there was no Wifi connection. In fact, as the staff informed us, there was not Wifi offered throughout the hotel, contrary to what we had been assured and what is advertised online, a screenshot we kept for proof. 
The only places you might catch a signal were in the lobby or downstairs (which we did not try). Not exactly conducive for our work if we had to sit in the public lobby for hours a day.
Anyways, all would not be lost if we could connect to the Internet by cable. Again, we were in for disappointment.
The hotel had run out of extra cables to give out, probably because the Wifi does not work. When eventually they did find two short cables, we found that the ends would only fit one of the wall slots provided to connect to the Internet. This would mean that only one person could be connected at a time (we were two people sharing a room with two single beds) when we both needed to work at the same time in the same room.
The one connection we had made dial-up look good. It was so slow it was essentially unusable. It was anything but the high speed being advertised. The hotel staff told us this was normal when there were a number of users in the hotel accessing the Internet.
We could not loose anymore time looking for a new place to stay and making sure that we had good access to the Internet. We left right away the next day back to London where we knew we could be connected. We lost two days, with nothing to show for it; we lost 100 GBP pounds in petrol driving up and back and we even had to pay for the one night we stayed at the Holiday Inn Express in Dunfermline.
It was not a particularly nice place either. It was clean and comfortable in a “cookie cutter” way that is familiar, with all hotels looking the same no matter where you are. No character whatsoever. The breakfast included with the accommodation was boring and limited. The view from the dining area was awful. Large wall windows overlooking a sprawling ASDA complex, the UK branch of Walmart.
A big thumbs down to staying at the Holiday Inn Express in Dunfermline.
