Business Model for Hotel Charging Changing?

[nvabill]

This sounds very reasonable to me, helps to prevent folks from hogging the charger when free preventing others from using it.

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[RickMachE]

What all of this shows you is:

1) You need to carefully research your hotel stops, check the charger on PlugShare, and if in a network, go to that network and check the rates and look for idle fees.

2) Things are constantly changing. What was free yesterday at that hotel may be a fee today.

3) Some hotels are giving up and letting networks run their chargers. Others let the network use the space. I've seen hotels with Tesla V2 chargers, sitting with no one on them.

4) Just because it's in someone's parking lot, doesn't mean they have anything to do with it.

5) Some hotel chargers are old, and very slow. Others are shared, and your charging speed may cut in half if someone else plugs in.

6) While leaving with 100% is nice, if it's too pricey OR the hotel is much more expensive than alternatives, it may not be worthwhile. I like that extra 45 mins on first leg in the morning, but it's not worth it sometimes.

7) Many level 2 chargers end a session when you're full. In the morning, when your departure time kicks in, they may not kick in unless you start a new session.

8) Some hotel charging spaces get iced, or are so tiny you will get door dings. I won't park in those.

My recent experiences with L2 chargers at hotels and destinations:

- 4 L2 J1772 and 1 Tesla Destination charger. Tesla was faster, so I used my adapter and charged there.

- Shared chargers at a ski area. Not free, but competitive. Every day we got one, which shocked us. More shocking were the people that knew they were shared and plugged in to the next pedestal instead of getting us (and them) 1/2 the power.

- Hotel was $50 a night cheaper than one with a charger. Free breakfast AND dinner, with 3 drink coupons each. Nearby was a FREE DC fast slow charger (44kW), one block walk in a free parking garage. We've now stayed there twice on trips. Same hotel chain (Drury Inns) has keycard charging with huge spaces at several hotels.

 

[Thunderbuck]

This may be an unpopular opinion…but I think destination charging is probably done. It won’t scale, it hasn’t kept up, and hotels now view it as a chargeable amenity.

I made a reservation at a hotel that listed an L2 charger as an amenity…but it wasn’t their charger and it was $8 per hour. You had to physically move your car out of their garage to the L2 deck and then move it again after a few hours. If that is the way it is going to be, then I AM DONE with hotel charging.

The right answer for traveling is L3 infrastructure in my opinion.

I think an interesting question is around what model works for folks that don’t own a home. It will be interesting on how that plays out. I think the profit center move may play here as well.

It all comes down to "dwell time". If you're in a place for less than an hour (say, a grocery store), it should be DCFC. If you're going to be there 3+ hours, L2, which is considerably cheaper to install and maintain than a DCFC.

No, I don't want to hook up to a DCFC at a hotel. If I arrive at 10pm I want to go straight to bed, I don't want to have to move my car an hour later. Much better that the hotel take the $300k they'd spend installing 1 DCFC and use it to install a dozen L2s.

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