Hotel WiFi speeds compared: the fastest and slowest cities and hotels

A heated pool and cable TV are easy to check before booking. WiFi quality is not — a hotel only has to tick the "WiFi available" box, whether the connection can handle a video call or barely loads an inbox. A 2016 dataset of nearly 1,900 hotels across eight cities showed just how wide that gap could be.

The figures below come from a 2016 crawl of listings on HotelWiFiTest, a crowdsourced hotel-connectivity tracker, cross-referenced against Akamai's Q4 2015 "State of the Internet" country-speed report for context. The exact per-hotel and per-city Mbps figures are historical and cannot be independently re-measured today — they are presented as reported in 2016 and are illustrative of the spread at the time, not a live ranking.

How the data was gathered

The dataset covered eight cities: London (384 hotels), New York (321), Bangkok (242), Paris (240), Berlin (237), Barcelona (196), Singapore (136) and San Francisco (134) — 1,890 hotels in total. HotelWiFiTest assigns each hotel an expected download speed in Mbps, plus a confidence score reflecting how many tests were run, how recent they were, and how well they were spread across times of day and days of the week.

Confidence was patchy. The mean confidence score across all 1,890 hotels was under 25%, and more than 450 hotels scored below 7.5%. To keep the comparison meaningful, only the 644 hotels with a confidence score above 30% were used for the city and hotel rankings that follow. Room rates are cheapest-available standard-room prices as listed at the time.

The fastest and slowest cities

Ranked by mean expected download speed, London came out fastest among the eight cities at 20.88 Mbps (median 11.30 Mbps), ahead of Barcelona at 17.23 Mbps. San Francisco — a city hardly short of internet infrastructure — finished last at 6.88 Mbps, behind Bangkok (8.91 Mbps) and Singapore (9.06 Mbps).

San Francisco's hotels averaged barely a third of London's WiFi speed, despite the US at the time having a similar national average download speed to the UK.

For scale, Akamai's Q4 2015 report put South Korea's national average connection speed at 26.7 Mbps, the highest of any country measured — faster than even London's best-performing hotels averaged as a city. Hotel WiFi, in other words, routinely undershot the ordinary home or office connection available in the same country.

The fastest and slowest individual hotels

At the hotel level the spread was more extreme than the city averages suggest. Six properties reported speeds above 100 Mbps, four of them in London. The Mark in New York led the full list at an expected 235 Mbps, followed by every hotel Piccadilly in London at around 201 Mbps. Confidence scores for the top ten were comparatively strong, all above 50%.

At the other end, the InterCityHotel Berlin Hauptbahnhof reported the slowest speed in the dataset — about 0.08 Mbps, only marginally quicker than a dial-up modem. Forty-one hotels in the confidence-filtered set reported expected speeds below 1 Mbps, a threshold at which even basic browsing becomes frustrating and below YouTube's own recommended minimum of 0.5 Mbps for streaming.

Star rating and price did not reliably predict speed

The 2016 sample was small at the extremes — only the top and bottom ten hotels by speed — but it hinted at a rough relationship between room rate and WiFi speed: the fastest ten averaged around £212 a night against £71.50 for the slowest ten. Even so, the relationship broke down often enough that a high nightly rate was no guarantee of a usable connection, and later, larger studies of hotel chains have found the same pattern: budget and mid-tier chains have out-performed five-star names on WiFi speed, and Wi-Fi remains one of the most common guest complaints across price tiers, not just at cheaper properties.

Has anything changed since 2016?

In absolute terms, yes, considerably. Global fixed-broadband speeds have climbed roughly tenfold since the mid-2010s, so a hotel matching the 2016 city averages above would now look sluggish. What has changed far less is the unpredictability: surveys of hotel guests through 2025 still put unreliable or slow WiFi at or near the top of the complaint list, at properties of every star rating and price point, because bandwidth that's fine for a quiet Tuesday afternoon can collapse when a hotel is at full occupancy and every room is streaming at once.

How to check before you book

• Search the hotel by name on a current WiFi-speed tracker rather than trusting the amenities list.
• Favour hotels in a city's tourist or business core — the 2016 data found faster speeds clustered there in both London and New York.
• Read recent reviews specifically for internet complaints, since these are reported more often than star ratings suggest.
• For anything beyond email, treat hotel WiFi as a backup and carry a mobile hotspot or eSIM data plan.

Frequently asked questions