As a small business owner who spends most of his life in airplanes and hotels, there is nothing I appreciate more than a fast internet connection. Staying connected means I have more flexibility, and it allows me to take a weekday flight if I can be online and available the entire time.
While I miss the days of being able to log off and mentally check out for an entire flight, I certainly don’t miss landing after a 16-hour flight to dozens of urgent messages and an overflowing inbox. Because of this, I’ve come to what is most likely an unpopular conclusion:
We should all want to pay way more for inflight Wi-Fi.
Much more.
Let me explain: Wi-Fi speed on a given flight is directly related to how many people are using the connection, and the more it costs, the more likely you are to be one of the few using it. Leisure travelers are less likely to pay for access than business travelers, and people seem less likely to bother on short flights than long ones. Gogo provides a solid option for many carriers in the US, and I think its Wi-Fi is priced fairly reasonably, all things considered. I certainly get a ton of value out of the $60 a month I spend for an unlimited pass — it has completely changed the domestic experience for me.
However, many business travelers feel the same way, and on Monday morning and Thursday evening transcontinental flights, the internet speeds are consistently so slow it can be unusable.
Southwest Airlines uses its own internet provider, and charges just $8 per day for access. And anyone who has tried to use the internet on a Southwest flight for anything more involved than Twitter has likely experienced the boundless frustration of not even being able to load your email inbox. The same is true for international flights. Emirates offers every passenger on its A380 flights 10 MB of free data, with an additional 600 MB only being $1.
This is certainly a bargain, but at such a low price point, nearly all of the 500 passengers on a 16-hour flight are going to take advantage, which is awesome because then anyone can post a picture of his dad tending the onboard bar to Facebook.
My Dad at the Emirates bar on his surprise birthday trip around the world
The problem, however, is that with all 500 of your fellow passengers trying to use the connection, the data speeds are going to feel like going back to the AOL dial-up days. Across a dozen flights on Emirates, I’ve never been able to do more than send brief iMessages — laptop use is basically unthinkable.
On the other end of the spectrum, Singapore Airlines offers Wi-Fi on some long-haul flights, and charges an outrageous amount per MB, which I actually wouldn’t mind if the internet was fast, but the first 10MB are reasonably priced, and enough people must try to take advantage that it’s impossibly slow.
On a recent flight from Frankfurt to JFK I spent $41 (FORTY ONE!) on data, and over the course of a seven-hour flight I managed to send out a couple of Tweets and read a couple of emails. I didn’t even post a picture to Instagram. The solution, I think, lies somewhere in the middle.
More and more airlines are offering Wi-Fi on selected long-haul flights, such as:
- American
- Delta
- British Airways
- Etihad
- Japan Airlines
- Lufthansa
- United
In most cases, these airlines offer a “flight pass” in the $20-$30 range. This isn’t cheap, by any means, but for a business traveler it’s well worth it, particularly for usable speeds.
So while I appreciate airlines like Emirates that consider Wi-Fi to be part of the product it’s offering, I would rather pay 30x as much if it means actually being able to get some work done on a flight.
What about you? Do you think airlines should subsidize the cost of WiFi, or is a la carte pricing better?
Ben Schlappig is the founder and author of One Mile At A Time, and flies over 300,000 miles per year while living in hotels full-time. You can follow his travels on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.