{"id":4524,"date":"2017-04-10T11:49:56","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T09:49:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=4524"},"modified":"2017-04-10T11:52:44","modified_gmt":"2017-04-10T09:52:44","slug":"hotel-internet-and-uber","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/4524\/","title":{"rendered":"Hotel Internet and Uber"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via Samizdata<\/a> (and others), it appears Italy has banned Uber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

An Italian court banned the Uber app across the country on Friday ruling that it contributed unfair competition to traditional taxis. In a court ruling, a Rome judge upheld a complaint filed by Italy’s major traditional taxi associations, preventing Uber from using its Black, Lux, Suv, XL, Select and Van services from operating within the country.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In my recent post<\/a> on Budapest I said:<\/p>\n

I think in a few years we\u2019ll be at a stage where a city not having Uber will start to cost it dearly in terms of visitor numbers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I remember back in 2004-2006 when I did lots of business travel one would have to check in advance whether a hotel would have internet in the rooms. In those days this\u00a0meant an ADSL connection in the wall and (sometimes) a cable, and not all hotels had them. In December 2005 I went to Korea<\/a> and found the (wonderful) hotel had a 100mbs ADSL connection in the room that required no login or faffing about whatsoever, and they didn’t even bother to advertise it. When I went back to Seoul a couple of years later I said<\/a>:<\/p>\n

When I booked the hotel, I couldn\u2019t see whether it had internet connections in the rooms or not.\u00a0 It mentioned kettles, ironing boards, and hairdryers, but no internet connection.\u00a0 So I called them up, and I was\u00a0told they had one in every room.\u00a0 I seem to remember when I last stayed in Seoul they didn\u2019t advertise the internet connections in the rooms, and this place seems to be no different.\u00a0 Clearly internet connections in\u00a0Korean hotel\u00a0rooms are as\u00a0standard as doors, windows, and beds.\u00a0 Sure enough, this place, like my last hotel, has a 100Mbps connection which costs absolutely nothing and works as soon as you hook the cable up to your computer.\u00a0 No ringing the front desk for usernames, no messing about with passwords, simply plug in and off you go.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I cite this passage because it shows how unusual it was back then to find a functional internet connection in a hotel room even as late as 2007. Within a few years an internet connection became standard everywhere, and shortly afterwards this transformed into a WiFi option which eventually became standard. It may be the case that some hotels still charge for it, some require fiddly logon procedures, and the quality can vary but it is almost unheard of nowadays to find a hotel without WiFi, and it is usually free and often good. I suspect in the age of iPads and WhatsApp, any hotel that didn’t offer WiFi both in the rooms and common areas would quickly go out of business: people simply don’t use the telephone or even wired internet these days.<\/p>\n

I reckon in a few years we’ll be seeing the same thing with Uber, or at least a very similar service that works in much the same way. If Uber can survive a little longer, we will soon have a demographic that has only used Uber and is completely unfamiliar with the archaic practices and unwanted delights of a traditional taxi service, and will not contemplate using the latter any more than they would accept having no internet in a hotel room and instead have to use the single desktop in the hotel “business centre” with a broken mouse and an AZERTY keyboard left in Cantonese\u00a0mode by the last user.<\/p>\n

I give it five years, ten at the most, before cities where Uber is banned and no similar alternative exists start to see a serious reduction in visitor numbers. Like having a decent internet connection, being able to use an Uber-like service will soon become a key requirement of a holiday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via Samizdata (and others), it appears Italy has banned Uber: An Italian court banned the Uber app across the country on Friday ruling that it contributed unfair competition to traditional taxis. In a court ruling, a Rome judge upheld a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[77,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4524"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4524"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4527,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4524\/revisions\/4527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}