How much extra would you pay for a Hotel with Destination Charging that you could Reserve?

[Olle]

This is a follow up poll on the poll about if people are willing to stay at a hotel without destination charging. A big drawback seemed to be that it is hard to know if a spot will be available on arrival. One of the posters in the poll brought up the important point about how much a hotel could charge for reserved charging. I had already realized that I am willing to pay a premium for destination charging and am curious of what others think.
If a spot could be reserved and guaranteed, how much extra would you be willing to pay? Btw, I wrote more than or equal to 10 kW since I noticed that anything less wouldn't give you a full overnight charge on an average Tesla.

 

[RTPEV]

Sorry, but I consider this another flawed poll. I wish you hadn't included the 10kW charge rate caveat because I don't agree that that is the minimum charge rate needed at a hotel. True, your own experience is that 6kW wouldn't fully charge your Tesla, but that's probably a corner case of showing up with an extremely low SOC, desiring to get all the way to 100%, and having a shorter than average layover. Sure, there will be those that show up at midnight and leave at 7am, but when I am traveling, 10am -> 8am seems reasonable to me, and 10 hours at 6kW will get you 60kWh, or enough to get you from 20% to 95%. And for a multi-night stay, even 3.3kW is probably okay to get up to 100% over two nights.

The second flaw is that other than $0, your minimum amount is $20, which I think is a bit high for what I essentially consider an amenity (although one that I would be okay with paying SOMETHING for). I would probably be willing to pay $10-15 for an overnight charge. At $20, I'd probably be looking for another property, or skipping the charge altogether.

I mean yes, you could look at it the way that @bradtem pointed out that it may be financially worth up to $40 (in an extreme case) to avoid a Supercharger visit, but it would be extreme for a hotel to charge that for slow AC charging. At any rate, $40 would definitely put a cap on what I would be willing to pay.

Of course resorts and urban area hotels may charge $20/night (or more) just for valet parking, or sometimes even just for self parking, but if we are talking about a need to be full in the morning for another day of driving on a long road trip, I don't think that is the type of hotel we are talking about.

I think competition among hotel chains will sort this out, and I doubt it will be anywhere near the astronomical prices that are in your poll.

 

[cpa]

I did not vote. But I will comment that the hotel/motel will have to eliminate any form of ICEing of their EV chargers. Time and again I have arrived at a property only to see that the EVSE has been ICEd by other vehicles or a construction crew or some guy hauling a boat parking perpendicular with their ginormous pick ups and utility trucks to the parking slots. And the front desk merely shrugs their shoulders, like well sorry about that.

Sure, if you arrive at 3:30 in the afternoon, you are probably good to go. But any arrival past 6:00 or so and you takes your chances at many locations.

 

[RayK]

I also did not vote since the poll doesn't make clear that it's a one-time cost (per reservation), versus an additional cost per night of stay.

Either way, for me, I'd pay an extra $20-$30 for the lodging reservation. For one night or 3-4 nights. And having reserved charging means to me that I'll be getting a dedicated parking spot for the duration of my stay; not be be taken over by any other guest at the location.

It's not too often I'm only staying one night at a motel/hotel. I tend to take trips that can be done in one full day of travel (LA, Yosemite, Tahoe, Southern Oregon) and staying for at least a couple of days. I'm always looking for local charging infrastructure at my destination prior to my trip, so having the capability for overnight charging where I'm sleeping would be a bonus option. For longer trips I'd consider flying and renting a car instead.

edit: Added bolded statement for clarity. I always carry UMC with many different adapters, CHAdeMO and J1772 on trips. Soon to include CCS!

 

[bradtem]

Sorry, but I consider this another flawed poll. I wish you hadn't included the 10kW charge rate caveat because I don't agree that that is the minimum charge rate needed at a hotel. True, your own experience is that 6kW wouldn't fully charge your Tesla, but that's probably a corner case of showing up with an extremely low SOC, desiring to get all the way to 100%, and having a shorter than average layover. Sure, there will be those that show up at midnight and leave at 7am, but when I am traveling, 10am -> 8am seems reasonable to me, and 10 hours at 6kW will get you 60kWh, or enough to get you from 20% to 95%. And for a multi-night stay, even 3.3kW is probably okay to get up to 100% over two nights.

The second flaw is that other than $0, your minimum amount is $20, which I think is a bit high for what I essentially consider an amenity (although one that I would be okay with paying SOMETHING for). I would probably be willing to pay $10-15 for an overnight charge. At $20, I'd probably be looking for another property, or skipping the charge altogether.

I mean yes, you could look at it the way that @bradtem pointed out that it may be financially worth up to $40 (in an extreme case) to avoid a Supercharger visit, but it would be extreme for a hotel to charge that for slow AC charging. At any rate, $40 would definitely put a cap on what I would be willing to pay.

Of course resorts and urban area hotels may charge $20/night (or more) just for valet parking, or sometimes even just for self parking, but if we are talking about a need to be full in the morning for another day of driving on a long road trip, I don't think that is the type of hotel we are talking about.

I think competition among hotel chains will sort this out, and I doubt it will be anywhere near the astronomical prices that are in your poll.

No hotel charges $40 to charge up, in fact almost all of them include charging free with your stay.
What I wrote is that if you otherwise need to buy 50kwh at a supercharger and you will pay 50 cents/kwh there, it's worth at least $25, but really more because of the time saved and convenience and better treatment of your battery.

The key is that free charging is more common at nicer hotels. You might find the non-charging hotel being $100 and the hotel with charging $140. Odds are you save not just $25 on electricity and get the above factors, you probably also get a nicer hotel, making that $140 an easy choice.

Tesla official destination charging in particular is skewed to higher end hotels because there is a perception that Teslas are expensive luxury cars, especially in the days when these chargers went it. You will find J1772 chargers at either 7.2kw or 6.2kw at a wider variety of hotels.

 

[bradtem]

This is a follow up poll on the poll about if people are willing to stay at a hotel without destination charging. A big drawback seemed to be that it is hard to know if a spot will be available on arrival. One of the posters in the poll brought up the important point about how much a hotel could charge for reserved charging. I had already realized that I am willing to pay a premium for destination charging and am curious of what others think.
If a spot could be reserved and guaranteed, how much extra would you be willing to pay? Btw, I wrote more than or equal to 10 kW since I noticed that anything less wouldn't give you a full overnight charge on an average Tesla.

It's pretty rare to charge fully! To do that you need to pull in at 0 miles (don't do it and it's risky) and you have to fill to 100% which you also rarely want to do unless you truly need it.

More commonly the most you will do is pull in with 10% and charge to 90%. My car is down to 230 miles range now so I will almost never put more than 50kwh in it, and that's easy-peasy at 6kw because you always spend around 10 hours at a hotel, when you include breakfast, and getting ready for bed and all the other stuff. So no, you don't need 10kw, and you don't find 10kw very often. 7.2kw you will find, which will get you 72kwh which should be just fine in a long range model 3. And if you can't get every last drop, it just means you supercharge slightly sooner or slightly more, not the end of the world.

 

[Olle]

Sure, I get it. That's fine on a trip with big margins.

I was referring to a highway roadtrip in an Y, which doesn't have enough range to comfortably do such a trip. I was trying to make the drive/break pace reasonably comfortable by pushing the car to its limit. Optimizing for time without official charging spot reservation, I usually leave the last SC with just enough range to drive 85 mph (highest for the new AP) and arrive at the hotel at 5%, just in case the spot is taken. Towards the end I usually need moderate the speed a little. If a spot was guaranteed I would aim for 0%. Like I wrote earlier, I got to only 85% overnight at 6 kW from arriving at 4%. 7.2 kW wouldn't cut it either. (3 or S are a different story of course, since they easily exceed most people's bladder range).
If current is at a premium, a hotel could offer mostly 6 kW and just a few 10 kW, perhaps for a fee, so that they go to the people who need them. Win-win.

 

[bradtem]

Sure, I get it. That's fine on a trip with big margins.

I was referring to a highway roadtrip in an Y, which doesn't have enough range to comfortably do such a trip. I was trying to make the drive/break pace reasonably comfortable by pushing the car to its limit. Optimizing for time without official charging spot reservation, I usually leave the last SC with just enough range to drive 85 mph (highest for the new AP) and arrive at the hotel at 5%, just in case the spot is taken. Towards the end I usually need moderate the speed a little. If a spot was guaranteed I would aim for 0%. Like I wrote earlier, I got to only 85% overnight at 6 kW from arriving at 4%. 7.2 kW wouldn't cut it either. (3 or S are a different story of course, since they easily exceed most people's bladder range).
If current is at a premium, a hotel could offer mostly 6 kW and just a few 10 kW, perhaps for a fee, so that they go to the people who need them. Win-win.

Well, my 3 won't do more than 7.2kw anyway, but it's fairly rare to see chargers that do more than that with J1772. Tesla destination chargers are more often found with more. Taking your car to zero is advised only for special situations, it is definitely one of the things that is bad for the battery. Going to 100 is also bad, though it's better if you start driving immediately so you don't keep it up there too long.

But yeah, if this is you, you might not fill up at a hotel, particularly if you don't spend any time not sleeping at the hotel. That's not what I call road tripping of course, that's just grueling hard slog "get from A to B" which I avoid as much as I can. I would normally say better and cheaper to fly, but right now the rental car and airport situations are terrible - but if things go back to normal, such trips are of course faster and cheaper by air. Remember, your car has total cost of 40 to 50 cents a mile, a bit less with free electricity but with hotel costs it's MUCH cheaper to fly.

In other words, for 99% of folks, hotel overnight is much more than enough. Some are in the 1%.

But it's still good. You are going to supercharge. The fact that you got to 85% just means you use the supercharger a slight bit extra. The cost is modest, including in time, because the low end of the supercharge is quite fast. As you probably know, for the fastest travel time, you only charge to 60% at the supercharger unless it's mealtime, and charge more often. ABRP defaults to this plan, but I don't like it and prefer the slightly slower plan with fewer charges but charging to 90%

 

[Zythryn]

I don’t know that I would pay anything extra.
However, I will always stay at a hotel that offers charging, over a hotel that doesn’t. This is the case if I need the charge, or if I don’t.

 

[Olle]

. The fact that you got to 85% just means you use the supercharger a slight bit extra. The cost is modest, including in time, because the low end of the supercharge is quite fast. As you probably know, for the fastest travel time, you only charge to 60% at the supercharger unless it's mealtime, and charge more often. ABRP defaults to this plan, but I don't like it and prefer the slightly slower plan with fewer charges but charging to 90%

No. 85% charge meant that I lost 15% potential driving distance before I had to stop again. Too many sub optimizations like that could have turned an otherwise comfortable trip into a hard slog. Which is exactly what I wanted to avoid this time.

You guys are a tough bunch I see that some refuse to believe that sometimes people need to charge from 0% to 100% and that I therefore should have flown instead.

My daughter moved to Boston and we needed to move ourselves and a bunch of her stuff that wouldn't fit on a plane, and quickly. Only Friday afternoon and Saturday were available. It is what it is. After that we needed to stop at a dozen places with hundreds of miles between them in NY, New England and VA over the course of two weeks. You can't just claim that flying is always better because flying is what people "should" do.

How would flying be better for this trip? The trip was actually really fun and comfortable, except for the anxiety with the hotels that didn't wan't to reserve a spot, despite our willingness to pay for it. Hence the survey.

 

[bradtem]

No. 85% charge meant that I lost 15% potential driving distance before I had to stop again. Too many sub optimizations like that could have turned an otherwise comfortable trip into a hard slog. Which is exactly what I wanted to avoid this time.

You guys are a tough bunch! I see that some refuse to believe that sometimes people need to charge from 0% to 100% and that I therefore should have flown instead because that would be cheaper or faster.

My daughter moved to Boston and we needed to move ourselves and a bunch of her stuff that wouldn't fit on a plane, and quickly. Only Friday afternoon and Saturday were available. It is what it is. After that we needed to stop at a dozen places with hundreds of miles between them in NY, New England and VA over the course of two weeks. You can't just claim that flying is always better because flying is what people "should" do.

How would flying be better for this trip? The trip was actually really fun and comfortable, except for the anxiety with the hotels that didn't wan't to reserve a spot, despite our willingness to pay for it. Hence the survey.

It's not that I don't believe you. And I believe you there are times not to fly. My point is that your story is fortunately less common, and that for most people, overnight at a hotel at 7.2kw is more than adequate.

Yes, you lost some driving distance. Sometimes that means supercharging a bit earlier. Sometimes it means the same supercharger, arriving with less. Overall, it's not that big a difference, unless in the rare case it forces you to do say 4 supercharges instead of 3. Usually you can avoid that. As I said, the fast strategy is to charge only to 50-60% and go. Well, it can be the fast strategy. If the chargers are not close to the highway I think it's not as good, though ABRP is supposed to calculate it. If you fill to 85% instead of 100%, you might pick a different charger but I doubt it adds more than 10-15 minutes to your day. I don't know your exact route, but you could plug it into ABRP to test it, trying it out with the car at 100% vs 85% and see how much time it adds. Annoying, but not a crisis. Which is why 7.2kw is fine, though slightly less than perfect for your example.

As for flying, of course it depends on the type of the trip. If you need to haul special gear driving can be right. If you can't get a rental car, as is the case today, obviously that's a factor. If you have 4 people in the car, flying can be more expensive in dollars, though naturally not in time. I had the impression this was a one person slog, though. And flying has gotten so bad right now I have heard of people driving 6-7 hours rather than fly.

 

[RTPEV]

The key is that free charging is more common at nicer hotels. You might find the non-charging hotel being $100 and the hotel with charging $140. Odds are you save not just $25 on electricity and get the above factors, you probably also get a nicer hotel, making that $140 an easy choice.

If the survey question was intended to ask if I would be willing to spend $X extra for a potentially nicer hotel that offered guaranteed, reserved overnight charging, I'm not sure my answer would change much, but yes, I would probably be willing to spend a bit extra on such a hotel, if only to encourage more hotels to offer such amenities, but I still doubt I would go much above $25 or so, since budget is important to me, particularly on a trip where I'm not really taking advantage of additional "luxuries" that a nicer hotel would afford. I did not interpret the survey that way (it sounded to me more like an added fee, but reading again, I do see there are alternate interpretations.

 

[RTPEV]

It's pretty rare to charge fully! To do that you need to pull in at 0 miles (don't do it and it's risky) and you have to fill to 100% which you also rarely want to do unless you truly need it.

On a trip I always set my limit to 100% and I would certain not hesitate to fill up to 100% at a hotel, just as I do before I leave home. I'm one who babies my battery, but the occasional charge to 100%, particularly when it's not going to sit there for more than a few hours, is not that concerning to me.

That said, I do agree that it's going to be uncommon to find 10kW charging at a hotel. More likely you are going to find 7.2 (30A x 240V) or 6.2 (30A x 208V). So why not just plan for that in your trip plan? I.e. if you know you are only going to be at the hotel for 7 hours (midnight to 7) at can only count on 6kW charging (42kWh) and really want to start at 100%, I would use something like ABRP to set an arrival SOC of 44% at the hotel. That might mean I have to spend a bit more time at the preceding Supercharger stop (or maybe my plan shifts me to a Supercharger closer to the hotel), but if the 5-10 extra minutes that might take can save me $40 or more on a hotel because the only hotel that supports 10kW charging is that much more expensive, well, in my book, it's well worth it.

And as @bradtem said, if you only get to 85% SOC, it's also not the end of the world. So you end up having to stop a bit sooner at the first Supercharger stop. I suspect the parameters of the trip are not such that an entire Supercharger stop could be avoided if it weren't for that "lost" 15%.

The other thing that comes to mind, which is actually off topic for the question at hand, but the OP mentioned going 85mph. Granted, out west this is probably the normal flow of traffic. Between Florida and New England (i.e. I-95) where the speed limits are 65-70 for most of that route, and traffic fairly heavy, there are certainly people going 85mph, but I usually travel 72-75 on most of these stretches and I certainly don't feel like I'm the slowest. I wonder how much would be gained by simply slowing down to 75? Yes, you lose roughly 7 minutes every hour, but would the efficiency gain be enough to allow you to spread out Supercharger stops enough to make that up? Interesting question. I wonder if anyone's worked it out.

 

[Olle]

The other thing that comes to mind, which is actually off topic for the question at hand, but the OP mentioned going 85mph. Granted, out west this is probably the normal flow of traffic. Between Florida and New England (i.e. I-95) where the speed limits are 65-70 for most of that route, and traffic fairly heavy, there are certainly people going 85mph, but I usually travel 72-75 on most of these stretches and I certainly don't feel like I'm the slowest. I wonder how much would be gained by simply slowing down to 75? Yes, you lose roughly 7 minutes every hour, but would the efficiency gain be enough to allow you to spread out Supercharger stops enough to make that up? Interesting question. I wonder if anyone's worked it out.

I set it to 85 mph and as you point out, I-95 traffic is slower than that at times, sometimes even crawling. So 85 is just my max, not average. Your question about optimal speed for shortest total travel+SC time is an interesting one. This article describes Bjorn Nyland speed record for 2781 km through Europe. He drove 170 kmh (106 mph) as he had found optimal, when traffic allowed. That was on Ionity chargers. Obviously V3 would increase the optimal speed, but I haven't seen anyone test it.

 

[avs007]

No hotel charges $40 to charge up, in fact almost all of them include charging free with your stay.

I stayed at a 4 Points Sheraton that had 3 L2 chargers right up front by the main lobby. The L2 charger cost $5.00 / hour. Needless to say, I didn't use it, and instead went to the supercharger 1/2 mile away.

 

[bradtem]

I stayed at a 4 Points Sheraton that had 3 L2 chargers right up front by the main lobby. The L2 charger cost $5.00 / hour. Needless to say, I didn't use it, and instead went to the supercharger 1/2 mile away.

Well, you might want to ding them for this on plugshare or the hotel review sites. $5/hour for L2 just says "we want to advertise we have charging but it's not what you will want to use."

Though I would pay the $5/hour if I had no other choice. And many drivers don't care at all about the charging cost (see other thread) so might pay it.

I do expect more hotels to want to bill for charging over time. Let's face it, hotels love to bill for things, have you tried the mini-bar? But if they follow the mini-bar example and charge double what others do, it will be annoying.

 

[RTPEV]

As an interesting data point, I stayed at a brand new Hampton Inn last weekend that had a dual-headed ChargePoint charging station out back. 6kW charging (208V x 30A). It was not free, but rather $0.17/kWh (for New York State, I consider this quite fair!) As far as I could tell, there were no idle fees, but it was hard to tell because despite the fact that this was definitely a ChargePoint station and the charge came from ChargePoint, it's not on their map so I could not get the full fee structure.

I came in at a very low SOC (I did unplug for a bit and charge at another charging station while I was away from the property) and charged to 100%. Altogether the cost was just over $10 (a hair under 60kW total). Probably would have been around $12 if I had charged straight through.

While I certainly would have preferred "free", I think this was a fair price to pay.

 

[bradtem]

As an interesting data point, I stayed at a brand new Hampton Inn last weekend that had a dual-headed ChargePoint charging station out back. 6kW charging (208V x 30A). It was not free, but rather $0.17/kWh (for New York State, I consider this quite fair!) As far as I could tell, there were no idle fees, but it was hard to tell because despite the fact that this was definitely a ChargePoint station and the charge came from ChargePoint, it's not on their map so I could not get the full fee structure.

I came in at a very low SOC (I did unplug for a bit and charge at another charging station while I was away from the property) and charged to 100%. Altogether the cost was just over $10 (a hair under 60kW total). Probably would have been around $12 if I had charged straight through.

While I certainly would have preferred "free", I think this was a fair price to pay.

That is a reasonable fee, though the night rate for electricity is almost surely lower than that in most places. Since the supercharger will be from 28 cents to 60 cents, it's a clear win over the supercharger in so many ways -- but not as much of a win as if it's free (included in the hotel rate.)

Idle fees are an issue. Many people will come to a a hotel on road trips looking for a fairly full charge, a few will come looking for less. However, nobody is interested in having to get up in the middle of the night to move their car. I used a FLO charger that was on the street in front of my hotel once on the Sunshine Coast of BC. That charger was near nothing else, only hotel guests would ever want it at night. Even with 2 chargers, 1 empty, I saw at 3am it started charging me idle fees. I had to get dressed and go down to move the car. Not at all a happy experience.

For hotel charging the best plan is:

• Obviously, just have enough EVSEs to meet the need. It's OK to have "shared power" ones as long as you don't but more need than can be filled in a night, which is not always easy to figure out.
• Failing that, have each charging station serve at least 2 parking spaces, or even 4. Have a hotel employee who comes out in the night when told a car is full and have it move the plug to another car. The problem: Teslas won't let you do that with their connector, which is something Tesla should fix. (Program certain GPS locations to say, "after my car reaches this SoC, allow anybody to unplug it.")
• Failing that, have a way to alert car #2 when the charger is available and have that person wake up to move the cord. This would be the price of reserving second slot. As above, Teslas would need to be able to release the plug, or we'll wake you up so you can release it in the app. Only if you don't would idle fees apply.

As noted, the best thing is for a Tesla to just be able to recognize whether it's on a charger that should stay locked once full, or one where it should unlock when full. Generally:

• If you are using the J1772 adapter, that stays locked to prevent theft of the adapter. The J1772 can be removed manually after charging finishes
• Using your own mobile connector, that says locked to prevent theft of that adapter
• You can set the policy for your own wall connector at home
• Owners of other wall connectors (destination chargers) can set policy but the normal policy for these is they should unlock once the car is full.

 

[Sandor]

From personal experience, this is as bad an idea as it gets. Last month I stayed at a hotel that listed a Tesla destination charger. Given the location and the charger availability I decided it should be a nice choice to enjoy couple of days stay. Nowhere listed was the fact that you could reserve it exclusively. So some other Tesla driver did so and ICE'd the charger without moving his car for more than 30 hours (at least every time that I passed by he was there and didn't look like the car was moved at all). I asked the front desk to help contact the other driver but of course they were spectacularly unhelpful, and not only with this issue. But they put a big sign with "This EV charging spot is reserved EXCLUSIVELY for Mr. ***** from xx/xx to xx/xx" after I asked for assistance... The other spot where you could park to charge from the dual connector (but didn't have "Reserved for EV" signage) of course had an ICE vehicle parked. I didn't supercharge before arriving so I was at 15% SoC on arrival. I had to go to a local SC late at night in order to be able to use the car the second day we've stayed there. The red model 3 parked was in the same spot always. I looked at the charger and of course since the morning after the first night. it was not charging, steady light on the EVSE....So lets not encourage bad behavior on behalf of hotels or drivers. Pine Inn, Carmel-by-the-Sea is now on my *sugar* list of hotels that I will not stay at, even for free...

 

[ElectricIAC]

$0, it should be included in the rate..