Holiday Inn Express Woodmead Sandton

My company has been using Holiday Inn Express for a while now and even though initially it seemed good value for money, their latest antics proved to me that this company have begun to scrape the barrel in terms of charging the customer for services. When I first came to this hotel, it was new and the company seemed happy just to have one's business.

On my current visit to the Holiday Inn Express in Wood mead, and the same place I'm currently staying at present, I was insulted to find that they have changed their standard internet access service, which used to be a Pay-per-Megabyte service popular with many hotel groups.

Instead they have now implemented a pay-per-minute scheme. For those not technically inclined, let me give you this example of how Holiday
Inn Express takes your money without you knowing it: Lets say you need to check a few emails, and read over a document or two, one of which is on a website and the other, perhaps on your email. Reading over a document, once downloaded and whether on email or a website, can take anything between 5 and 10 minutes on average (usually longer). While it only takes you a few seconds to download these documents on a below standard broadband connection, the size of the data is possibly only around 1 Megabyte of data (the smallest unit used to measure cost when it comes to downloading data on the internet). Ordinarily one would pay between 50c per Mb and R2, the latter which is considered ghastly overpriced by today's standard. Whilst using Holiday Inn's internet service however, comparatively you would instead pay R30 for your 20 minutes of internet (and not the fastest I might add) and you are solely relying on time spent. If you spend your time reading a document you get charged, even if not making use of your internet connection. How would you feel if a cellphone company charges you an hourly rate just to have your phone on and leave it on, whether you receive calls or not. Another issue with this is that the voucher system software is not 100% compatible with programs like Firefox's or Internet Explorer's pop-up blockers, both which cause your voucher to continue utilizing your valuable airtime. So unless you turnoff this features off, you can kiss your airtime goodbye. If you like to spend your time reading news articles or keeping up to date with the latest happenings, get used to turning off your pop up blocker and disconnecting your session ever few minutes, else you'll use up your R90 voucher in no time.

My next surprise was their in house restaurant. Of course its a known fact that these restaurants charge a premium, since they know you have to get off your butt to go out and get a food. Having the convenience of sitting on your butt, means they can overcharge you. On a number of occasions, I found it was a) healthier and b) proportionally better and c) between R30 and R60 cheaper to order a meal at a family restaurant than it was to order it from your room.

For the Holiday Inn to charge R95 for a 350gr T-Bone steak, is in my opinion, very very sad. I know restuarants (in Cape Town even!) who have won awards for the quality of their meals as for their experienced chefs, yet charge the same amount as Holiday Inn does. The difference however is that instead of getting a sinewy steak from the Holiday Inn, you get one that simply blows your socks off.

So what am I going to do about all of this you might ask. Well the company I work for is fairly large, and as most clever businesses in the present climate, we too are undergoing cost cutting measures. At any one time we must a minimum of 30 people staying at one of the Holiday Inn hotel groups and in fact we even have our own inhouse travel agency just to assist with the quantities speaks volumes. So I've informed our travel agency that I will no longer be staying at the Holiday Inn group of hotels, even if it means I must drive an extra 20 kilometers. That way I'm still saving, since driving 20 kilometers is still cheaper than paying R90 per 1 hour of internet usage.

In our next review meeting, I will recommend that we cease all our dealings with this company, as I can't for one second imagine they thought they'd put their customers first when they came up with this initiative. Think twice before utilizing this companies services, as the hidden costs all add up eventually. This message is courtesy of the Holiday Inn Internet Voucher system, which I now have to reconnect to send this message. Oh, I'll need to enable my pop up blocker again. Sigh.

A well traveled individual...