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Free Cell Phones are Costly
The Travel Critic · December 1, 1997

Check into the $400-a-night Mark hotel in Manhattan, and along with your room key you'll get a cellular phone with no strings attached. Or so it will seem.

They say the phone is free at this swanky Upper East Side property, and technically speaking, it is-until you turn it on. That's when the meter starts running at an astronomical rate of $1.75 a minute, regardless of whether you're calling or being called. On a normal hand-held, you'd pay about 47 cents a minute for the same service.

The Mark is among the hotels on the vanguard of one of the more unsettling trends in the lodging business: giving gratis wireless gadgets to guests. In the past, road warriors had to rent cell phones from the concierge, and after they signed a $500 deposit for the devices, they more or less knew what they were getting themselves into.

Not anymore. Think of it as handing live grenades to party guests. "Don't worry, they're safe," you say, but you forget to mention that all bets are off if the pin is pulled.

And pulling the pin, as it were, can be pretty darned expensive. Bill Dunphy, director of marketing at the Mark, told me guests run up cell phone bills of about $12 a day. That's $84 a week-enough to take 10 of my closest friends across Central Park to Hunan Cottage for dinner.

In midtown Manhattan, the upscale Rihga Royal Hotel is doing the same thing. Visitors staying in their top 14 floors, which are appropriately called the pinnacle suites, get a free cell phone when they leave their credit card imprint at this $550-a-night hotel. Flip the "on" switch and the rate is 95 cents a minute for domestic, $1.95 for international calls. And you thought normal phone calls were expensive from your hotel.

Lest you get the impression that the free-phone phenomenon is limited to overpriced business travel hotels in the Big Apple, I've got news for you. At the venerable Westin St. Francis in San Francisco, which is installing portables in each of its 1,200 rooms, expect a $5 a day surcharge for starters. Its scaled-down cell phones can be used within several blocks of the hotel. Upgrading to a real cellular phone will cost $10 a day, plus $1 minute for domestic calls.

But to hear St. Francis hotel manager Charly Assaly talk about it, true cell service for every guest can't be far away. "We've begun installing antennas in restaurants, at Macy's and in other shops," he says. "People will be able to carry their phones anywhere."

The Wingate Inn, a moderately-priced corporate travel hotel chain based in Parsippany, N.J., has started giving its guests free portables, too. Except the devices are actually free. "Customers want mobility," says Keith Pierce, Wingate's vice president of marketing. "And they don't want to be nickeled and dimed."

Sounds nice, but once enough people start using the hand-helds, I wouldn't be surprised to see a fee added to Wingate's fine print.

Hotels would be well within their rights to raise their prices as high as they want, according to Kevin Maher, director of governmental affairs at the American Hotel & Motel Association in Washington, D.C. "There are no federal limits on what a hotel can charge for cellular service," he says.

What is going on here? I talked with Tom Ross, a senior analyst the Washington D.C.-based telecommunications consulting firm Strategis Group, about the cell phone giveaway. I wanted to know if this is something customers really wanted, or if it was just another way to profit from unwitting business travelers.

"This whole thing started with car rental companies offering cellular phones to people," he says. "I think it has some sort of appeal to customers, but it is also expensive-about twice what you'd pay for a regular cell phone."

It seems clear that hotels are making money off this new amenity. Cell phones are a wonderful convenience, but if you must stay connected, take yours with you and pay the roaming charges, which are sometimes $1.20 per minute less than what you'd have to shell out for a "free" phone.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.