WiFi Instant Captive Portal for Retail, Hotel and Education Use Cases
Guests not only want WiFi, but in many cases need it — and expect their host to provide it. A Captive Portal is one the best way to safely and efficiently connect guest devices to your business via WiFi for the last few dozen meters of connectivity in the modern world. In my previous blog, Guest WiFi Should be Safe, Secure and Useful, on NETGEAR WiFi Instant Captive Portal, I explained in depth what a captive portal is and why it’s useful for businesses and schools hosting WiFi. This time, I’ll be diving into some specific use cases of Captive Portal in hotel, retail, and education environments.
Hotel WiFi Captive Portal – Save Guests Time and Gain a Competitive Edge
Meet Julie, a Hotel Guest Manager. She set up NETGEAR Insight Instant Captive Portal for her hotel guests and especially enjoys the flexibility and customization features. She quickly determines each guest’s WiFi access based on the duration of their stay and sets a limit of two devices per hotel room to avoid the guest network from getting overly congested. These are just a few of the benefits the hotel and guests get from an Instant Captive Portal on the premises.
Whether a hotel guest is uploading their latest selfies with famous landmarks or finalizing the big presentation, guests expect to have powerful, safe, and reliable WiFi internet connections. Cellular data and tethering plans can be expensive, slow, or unreliable inside buildings. As their host, hotels will want to provide guests easy and quick access to their network, with minimal effort from staff. With an intuitive interface, Instant Captive Portal operations are low-effort with minimal staff training. And for guests, getting online is fast and simple, as access vouchers can be provided by staff if WiFi is included with rooms, and payment-based WiFi can be used if the Hotel WiFi access is an additional fee.
A Captive Portal like Instant Captive Portal not only provides Hotel WiFi with a customizable login process, but it also gives hosts powerful marketing options and speeds up the process of connecting to WiFi for guests. For instance, guests can be encouraged to use captive portal Social Login features, saving them time while also providing important demographic information and email marketing opportunities for hosts. Of course, The Captive Portal WiFi login screen is an excellent place to promote your in-house guest services through videos or display banners of the spa, restaurant, pool, and gift shop. With these new email and digital marketing opportunities, your printed flyers will feel outdated by comparison!
School WiFi Captive Portal – Enhancing Learning while Protecting Students and Staff
As the 5-minute bell rings, Sarah opens her school Chromebook. On the WiFi login screen, she watches a 10-second ad for the 4PM highschool football game and sees a banner for some great math tutoring opportunities the senior AP math class is providing. She clicks “Remind Me Later”. On the screen below, she reads: “Welcome back, Sarah. Do you want to reconnect to Lum School WiFi?”. She clicks “Yes” and pulls up last night’s English assignment for Mr. Rodney. Students and faculty of schools are increasingly relying on school WiFi systems to power their advanced collaborative learning tools such as tablets, laptops, and even virtual education solutions. These systems need to be safe, reliable, and flexible enough to service on and off school grounds. Captive portals allow IT staff to customize features that build upon standard WiFi configurations. Captive portals also allow you to use enhanced email marketing with user demographics, to ensure your school-provided WiFi is reaching the right audience. Together, it’s a win-win for the school and for learning. School WiFi needs many security features to keep students on track. With a captive portal on site, dangerous or distracting URLs can be filtered helping students stay more focused on classes. Time limits can also be set by staff to ensure users can only access WiFi during school hours. These captive portal operations for school WiFi are powerful, simple, and intuitive, giving IT staff more time to focus resources on learning tools. These are just a few of the security features and options available with Instant Captive Portal.
Retail WiFi Captive Portal – Build Customer Relationships and Unlock Opportunities
James sits down with his latte and pulls out his feather-weight laptop from its satchel. At the WiFi login screen, an animated “Welcome to Hot Bean Coffee” video appears with the message: “Log in with social or your email for 20% off baked goods or retail shop. Plus, join our email club for more discounts and exciting updates about weekly live music and comedy events.” He signs in, signs up, and kicks back, streaming his favorite videos and enjoying the atmosphere.
The future of retail is not just about generating sales, but about enhancing the entire experience of a venue through customer engagement on social sharing sites and email. Customers are asking retail businesses for a little extra effort to get them excited to leave the online shopping experience. This makes retail another great place to host WiFi Captive Portals. Guest WiFi networks with Captive Portals just make sense for businesses and customers, for everything from promotions and announcement banners and video on login, to deep user analytics with social login options. The marketing opt-in captive portal tools really keep customers engaged and coming back for more. Traditionally, providing a captive portal was difficult and expensive for small and medium businesses. Often businesses would need to rely on a dedicated IT staff or provider. The future of the captive portal is self-service for customers, but also for the business providing the WiFi Captive Portal.
