My wife and I stayed at a resort a while back on its own tropical island that was pretty technology free. No phones, TVs, radios, wifi, etc. For service, they had a little notepad and pencil which you used to write your request, then you put it in a bamboo mailbox outside your hut and raised the little canvas flag. They'd make the rounds occasionally in Mini Mokes to see to guests requests. Alternatively, you could make the five minute walk up to the main house. It was all pretty fun, especially considering the island was about 100 acres and only had about 25 people on it at any given time, so you really didn't see any other people unless you wanted to. Made you feel very disconnected for sure. But the resort got sold a few years ago and now all that has changed. They put in a big resort style pool, a fancy bar, TV's, phones & wifi in all the huts and worst of all replaced the Mini Mokes with golf carts. Boo.
I'm not really bothered by having wifi or not. When I'm travelling for leisure I use a smartphone to plan and look up information relevant to things I want to see and do there, but maps can be trivially downloaded in advance with Osmand~ (on F-droid), and the rest can be done trivially on a modest phone plan.
What sort of annoyed me on my last trip was how rental apartments and hotel rooms can have a lot of though put into them in terms of design, only to ruin it with a huge black rectangle mounted on the wall in a central location. I've had to unplug the TV's in two of these during this trip just to get rid of the bright standby LED!
I routinely unplug the TV - I’ve been in hotels where the TV has turned on at 3am (maybe post power cut) blaring out some noise.
Wifi is useful in situations like the hotel I was in last night - not a single bar of phone reception.
The thing I do want and is often missing is a socket near the bed so I can charge my phone but still have it next to me when the alarm goes off in the morning and I listen to the radio before getting out of bed.
90%+ of my hotel nights are for business purposes though.
> The thing I do want and is often missing is a socket near the bed so I can charge my phone but still have it next to me when the alarm goes off in the morning and I listen to the radio before getting out of bed.
Get a 10 ft charger cable and you never worry about this again.
Wifi quality and socket placement are two things I find myself usually judging hotels on. Not that they're the most important qualities, but unlike most other qualities I care about, they're the main ones that some hotels completely overlook.
This is almost always related to how old the building is. Newer builds will be wired up with more access points, and even Ethernet outlets in the room.
Few old hotel buildings will tear down walls to run Ethernet wire all over, even if just to install more access points. And if it is an old cinder block/concrete building, assume the worst.
Most of the big brand hotels in Hyatt/Hilton/Marriott/IHG had to get decent wifi installed though, using specific commercial products like Meraki and Ruckus and are subject to signal strength / bandwidth testing.
The weakness is still the puny requirements around how much up and down bandwidth the hotel brands require. They are still okay with non fiber 100Mbps down / 5Mbps up coaxial cable connections, which renders the rest of the equipment moot. But that may be because many or most hotels lack a fiber option period from the ISP.
When doing any kind of traveling, I carry a tiny roll of duct tape(I re-roll it onto a pencil). I have it for a million different possibilities, but probably 99% of the time I end up using it is to "turn off" all the standby LEDs in whatever room I'm in.
It'd be great if hotels saved the money on the TV and used it on finding a fridge that doesn't sound like it has spent the last 10 years trying to cool the Sahara.
In my experience that have figured out a 'solution' to that problem: they turn up the fridge thermostat to hardly cool (slightly less noise, almost no cooling)
I used to think that. I racked up thousands in internet fees on my honeymoon. I proposed wearing Google Glass. I worked for two major wearable electronics companies. I was addicted to being connected at all times.
Then I spent a year removing apps I do not need because as I grow older I am not proud of how many thousands of hours of my limited time on this rock I spent doom scrolling.
Eventually I ended up with one messenger, music app, a camera, a mapping app, and a browser.
Turns out, I do not even need those all the time. Started getting to where I would accidentally leave my phone at home... and did not notice.
Then I got a standalone offline digital audio player and enjoyed deciding what music to listen to again. I learned to notice signs and maps and surroundings to navigate on my own in most of my local area. I learned I can take notes on paper when I am out and research things later at home. I learned I do not actually owe it to anyone to be reachable during hours I am not being paid. I learned you can pick times and places to meet, and have a rich IRL social life outside chat rooms. I learned reading books on paper creates more focus.
I learned I could port my cell phone numbers to an old payhone that lives in my office and some old DECT landline phones around my home walk away from them when I leave to enjoy real life.
I have not used a cell phone since December 2021. I am comfortable living in my own head again and am the happiest I have ever been in my life.
Take baby steps to detox from connection addiction. You will not regret it.
It helps to find valuable, rewarding ways to spend your time that specifically require you to not have a phone in hand
... I do a lot of outdoors stuff (hiking, climbing, mountaineering) which takes me outside of cell coverage, and mostly occupies my hands & attention.
Other people just do regular sports, closer to home... Cycling, tennis, basketball, soccer, whatever. Any decent sized town or city should have some kind of options.
Indoors, I like craft skills that require your hands & attention... I give myself a bit of repairing climbing/hiking gear, assorted home improvement projects, etc.
The point is, this is all stuff that intrinsically feels good, so it's rewarding on its own. I think the best choices also have a social option, so you can connect with people, at the same time.
I'm legitimately very happy for you. But the thing is, even though I am absolutely too reliant on my devices and on tech in general, I like my stuff. It is possible for me to disengage if I need to, and I have taken steps to do that more often. I've been in situations with little or limited internet and it's not ideal and can be frustrating, but I can do it.
But the idea of being on vacation and unable to watch TV or a movie, stream a video, catch up on my podcasts, stream music, chat with my friends, play a game, or get stuck in some dumb Wikipedia k-hole at 2:00 in the morning, has absolutely no appeal. Yes, a lot of that stuff could be off-loaded to being done offline. I could pre-download videos, podcasts and albums. I could pack a ton of physical books or just download my Kindle library to my Onyx Boox or my Kindle Oasis (I genuinely prefer reading on an e-reader than on paper books because I like having the ability to switch between books and I'm a fast and voracious reader who often reads multiple books at a time -- and I've been that way since I was a child), but I would still resent not having internet access or a TV on my vacation.
But that's me. For better or worse, I am a very connected person, and I don't find a ton of comfort being disconnected. I pitched a number of magazines a story about me going to one of those extreme digital detox places (that don't allow any electronic devices of any type, so no Kindle, no offline music player, nothing) and documenting my descent into madness (or maybe enlightenment) a number of years ago, but no one bit. The bottom line is, the only way I would ever do something like this, willingly, would be because it would be funny to punish myself that way and because it would be a good story to tell. But as an actual vacation prospect, no. This whole concept just makes me more anxious and stressed than if I went to a nice resort where I could delete my work apps off my phone and enjoy Instagram on the beach with a Mai Tai.
Keep in mind that the tech you used back in the day was orders of magnitude less user-hostile than what we have now. Maybe your past "addiction" was in part caused by the utility these devices provided, and as that utility faded (or downsides became more noticeable) the addiction naturally went away?
