Boingo Review Online Access While Traveling

Boingo Service – Not a Good Option for Our Health Care Travelers

If you have a health condition that requires seeking treatment from a facility away from home, it may be useful to have a resource that allows you to stay connected and use an online service for Internet Access while traveling. Staying in touch with friends and concerned relatives with updates on your medical condition can help if you need to journey away from home for medical treatment. Also, having online access can be very helpful so that if you need to research additional information on your condition while out of town and give you flexiblity to work remotely, even if you’re away. While many hospitals today offer online access while in the facility, sometimes it can be useful to have internet access while in airports, hotels, and or train stations while you travel. Because some of our staff recently took a trip away from the office and used one of the heavily advertised services called Boingo, which is marketed as a way to utilize Internet hotspots in airports and selected locations worldwide, we thought we would review this service for our readers.

The Positives:

Signup was fast, easy, and no hassle, and the locations where service was available was easily found and utilized.

Pricing seemed actually very reasonable: 9.95 per month in the US

Global Service was advertised for 59.00 a month

The website states that the service is available in 500+ airports worldwide and 20,000 + hotels

Additionally, if you are a coffee drinker or McDonalds fan, there are 14,000 McDonalds locations along with more than 70,000 coffee shops and cafes where one can supposedly connect to a hotspot to utilize their internet access.

Using the service once signed up was easy and the software that was provided made it a no-brainer to connect to any hotspots that were in the vicinity. We actually had one of our writers use the service while on a trip to Europe and it worked surprisingly well.

The Bad Points:

* Although easy to sign up and use, don’t expect the same ease or accessibility if you want to cancel

* Read the fine print regarding unlimited access. Although we had no issues with exceeding the amounts of bandwidth, unlimited is not really unlimited, there are limits in terms of how much you can use the service, so read the small print carefully and understand that there are restrictions in terms of the services offered

* Retrieving your password if you forgot it is very difficult, if not impossible. The service asks for your user name, which can be different from your email address and then asks for the last 4 digits of your credit card billing number just to get your password. Instead of offering a way of emailing you your user name to your email address and/or giving you a way of resetting your password automatically, they make you call an agent which is next to impossible because of the wait times online. Probably the wait times are so long because their password retrieval options and the ability to cancel one’s service can not be done automatically

* Although the Boingo website promises “cancel at any time * we found that the service is very difficult if not impossible for us to cancel

* There is no ability to cancel once you are logged onto your account, the company states that if you wish to cancel you must call into one of their customer service representatives. This is easier said then done and when trying to do this I am reminded of one of the old reruns of “Candid Camera” where one gets caught in an endless loop of red tape trying to reach a real person. In this instance you have to press several numbers to get to the correct extension, then during the day wait times were frequently over 10 minutes which is hard to do when you are trying to get any work done or dealing with your own customers during busy work times. So we decided to go another route and just email the support email address that they publicized on their website right next to the toll free number where the wait times were so long. It took one day to get a message back from their “support” desk, and apparently, due to “security concerns” one cannot cancel their account via email, but has to call. Hmmm, let’s see if I get it. There’s no “security” risk to sign up online, and as a customer the company has no “security issue” with you as the customer giving them your credit card for immediate access to your account. However, the company does not provide its customers with an easy way to cancel or put their service on hold instead making you call either a number that has very long waiting times, or if you try to email them directly (we were told that it was a “security” issue and they would not accept cancellations via email. Note, that we were not transmitting any confidential or secure info via email, we were just simply asking that we not be billed for the service anymore since we couldn’t get in touch with anyone in a timely manner via the telephone numbers that were provided.

Alright, so now we were beginning to get a bit frustrated with Boingo, and decided to go ahead and attempt a call again, but this time got up in the middle of the night thinking that they would not be busy if we tried to cancel during “off peak times”. So we placed a call during the night and this time we were connected fairly quickly with a real person, however when we said we wished to cancel our service we were asked if we wanted to use pay as you go, and were given several other options to remain a customer instead of canceling. When we refused all these options and simply stated that we wished to cancel we were told that their system was “updating” but that the agent would take down our information and cancel our account when the system came back online. And the agent promised that she would email a confirmation of the cancellation when the system came back up. We waited yet another day and received no such confirmation. So we have emailed the company again, and have stated in writing that we do wish to cancel our service, have tried repeatedly to do so, and won’t be paying for any more of their automatic billing. I’ll update you all on what type of response we receive, if we receive any response from them on trying to get this company to cancel our account.

Final Thoughts: It is indeed unfortunate, that Boingo does not offer an online option for it’s customers to manage their accounts in terms of activating or de-activating service. With health care issues, many patients have travel needs that can vary from month to month and if this company offered a way to manage one’s service online easily, like activating or deactivating the service without having to call an agent and spend long times on hold, then this may be a good option. We were impressed by the actual use of the service, but felt like the company was trying to make it exceedingly difficult to cancel it’s service by it’s policies on not providing an easy way to cancel the service online.

Unfortunately, we cannot recommend this service at this time due to the issues we experienced above.