Hotels with the Best Wi-Fi in 2019

Let’s face it: whether you’re traveling on a business trip or dragging your teens on a family vacation, a hotel room with lousy internet is a recipe ripe for disaster.

Forget a janky toilet, a leaky faucet, or a ceiling light that pulsates like you’re at the slow-mo version of a rave. There’s nothing that pushes you all the way to DEFCON 1 like a crappy internet connection. (My eye isn’t twitching—your eye is twitching.)

To help you avoid that capital C catastrophe, we pulled a list of the top hotel chains in the US and ranked their internet connections from slowest to fastest. Now your teens can drop their luggage and hop onto Snapchat faster than they can yell “Mooo-ooom!”

Rodeway Inn’s free Wi-Fi rides away with the win.

Need Wi-Fi when your travel plans take an unexpected turn? We’ve all been there. Like that time your segway tour got rained out and you needed to google a new idea to keep the youngsters entertained.

Whatever your dilemma, these five hotels will connect you to the fastest complimentary Wi-Fi so you can activate Emergency Vacation Plan B.

Econo Lodge may be “economy,” but its purchased Wi-Fi speeds are premium.

Did you expect Hilton or maybe Marriott to top the list for fastest purchased Wi-Fi? We did too. But while both megahotel chains placed in the top five, the winner of the day was Econo Lodge.

Shocking, we know. But while this chain may be on the budget end of the spectrum, you know it delivers blastin’ Wi-Fi speeds. So you won’t be cursing yourself for forgetting to download that ZIP file you need for your sales presentation tomorrow.

Hampton Inn & Suites free Wi-Fi isn’t so sweet . . .

We hate to break it to you, but not all hotel stays come with speedy free Wi-Fi.

So if you’ve got a social media–loving teen or need to Skype your manager while on a business trip, avoid these five hotels like they’re bedbugs.

Hold the phone—are these Wi-Fi speeds even good?

It’s the age-old question (at least in the internet age): how much speed do I need? And boy, is it a doozy to answer. How much Wi-Fi speed you need depends on what you’re doing online—and there’s a lot of stuff to do online.

Updating your Instagram with gorgeous photos of the beach? That takes less speed than distracting your kiddos with Peppa Pig episodes on YouTube.

To give you an idea of what you’ll need, we created a mini cheat sheet. Check it out before you check in to your room.

Methodology

How’d we find these average speeds, anyway? First, we whittled down our list to the top 20 hotels in the US based on the number of US locations each chain has.

Then we paired that with data from HotelWiFiTest.com to calculate the average Wi-Fi speeds for each hotel chain. (We’ll be the first to admit some of these speeds are estimates due to limited data though. Let us know if you experience drastically different speeds at one of these hotels.)

And there you have it. Now that you know where the good Wi-Fi juice is at, book a room with a view and enjoy some poolside R&R while you respond to emails. Or just watch Netflix in peace. (We won’t tell.)

Edited by Cara Haynes