Every guest who connects to your Wi-Fi sees your splash page. For a busy venue that is hundreds of local people every week — an audience local businesses will happily pay to reach. Here is how to monetise it.
Hospitality Angle
The Problem
Guest Wi-Fi is a monthly outgoing with no return. Most venues pay for it, guests use it, and nothing comes back the other way.
What You’ll Learn
Four ways Fydelia generates revenue from your existing Wi-Fi — local advertising, dweller offers, paid access tiers, and flash promotions — and how to approach each one.
Where We Fit
Carden Hotspots installs Fydelia and configures your splash pages, ad zones, and promotional tools so the revenue mechanics are ready from day one.
Best For
Any venue with meaningful daily footfall — hotels, restaurants, pubs, leisure and entertainment venues, and multi-site operators.
Three Things to Know Before You Read On
- Your Wi-Fi splash page is seen by every guest before they get online — that is a guaranteed, captive impression every single time someone connects
- Local businesses — florists, taxi firms, nearby attractions, accountants — will pay for a slot on that page because it reaches exactly the local audience they want
- The revenue from even one or two regular advertisers can cover your monthly Fydelia platform cost, turning a cost centre into a break-even or profit-generating asset
Updated: 2025-07-01
Key sources: Fydelia Features · Fydelia Pricing
The Missed Opportunity
Think about what happens at the moment a guest connects to your Wi-Fi. They are shown a page before they get online. That page — your splash page — is a guaranteed impression. It is not a social media ad that someone scrolls past, or a newsletter that lands in the wrong folder. It is a full-screen moment that every connecting guest sees, on their own device, before they do anything else.
For a restaurant doing 80 covers a day, that is potentially 80 or more Wi-Fi connections per service. For a hotel with 60 rooms and a busy bar, it could be several hundred impressions daily. For most venues, that audience is currently shown a blank branded page — or worse, a generic router login — and nothing more.
The people connecting are local. They are present. They are, at that specific moment, doing something leisurely on their device. They are almost exactly the audience a local business wants to reach. And right now, nobody is paying you anything to reach them.
The Core Idea
You already have the audience and the platform. Fydelia gives you the tools to sell advertising on it, run your own promotions through it, and charge for premium access. None of this requires building anything new — it runs through the Wi-Fi login moment you are already facilitating.
Four Revenue Streams, One Platform
Fydelia supports four distinct ways to generate income from your guest Wi-Fi. They are not mutually exclusive — you can run all four simultaneously if the configuration suits your venue.
📢Local Business Advertising
Sell advertising slots on your splash page to local businesses. A florist, a taxi company, a nearby spa, a local tour operator — anyone whose customers overlap with your guests. They pay you a monthly fee for a branded banner or card displayed at the point of connection. This is entirely passive income once set up. The advertiser provides the creative; Fydelia displays it; you collect the fee.
Revenue potential: covers platform cost with 1–2 advertisers
⚡Dweller Flash Offers
Show time-sensitive promotions to guests who are already connected and on-site. A discount on a second order, a room upgrade offer, a dinner reservation incentive. Displayed at a configurable point — say, 30 or 45 minutes into a session — when the guest is most receptive. This drives your own revenue rather than a third party’s. A well-timed offer to a guest already enjoying your venue converts at a meaningfully higher rate than a cold promotion.
Best for: food & beverage, hotels, spas
💳Paid Premium Wi-Fi Access
Offer a free basic tier alongside a paid premium tier with faster speeds, longer sessions, or no bandwidth cap. Guests who need reliable, fast connectivity for work are often willing to pay a reasonable daily or session rate. This is particularly relevant for hotels, conference venues, and any location where business travellers are a significant part of the guest mix.
Typical pricing: £2–£5 per session / £5–£10 per day
📅Scheduled Promotional Campaigns
Run your own timed campaigns through the splash page — a Valentine’s Day dinner offer, a Mother’s Day afternoon tea promotion, a pre-Christmas gift voucher push. Schedule them in advance to run automatically during specific dates and times. This replaces or supplements your existing marketing channels with a zero-cost-per-impression channel that reaches guests at the exact moment they are in your venue.
No extra cost — included in Fydelia platform
Local Advertising in Practice
The local advertising opportunity is the one most venues have not considered at all, so it is worth working through in some detail.
Who would actually advertise?
The right advertiser is any local business whose customers overlap meaningfully with your guests. For a city-centre hotel, that might be a theatre company, a restaurant delivery service, a local tour operator, or a nearby day spa. For a country pub, it might be a local estate agent, a pet-friendly B&B for visiting families, a local farm shop, or a taxi firm covering the surrounding area. For a café, it could be a florist next door, a local gym, or a hair salon.
The pitch to these businesses is straightforward. Your splash page delivers guaranteed impressions to a captive local audience. It is not digital advertising where the targeting is probabilistic — these are real people, physically present in your area, at the moment they are connecting. That is genuinely valuable to a local business with a modest advertising budget.
What you are actually offering them
Every guest who connects to our Wi-Fi sees your ad before they get online. We have approximately [X] Wi-Fi connections per week. These are local people, physically here, on their phones. For £[monthly fee] your business gets a branded card or banner shown to all of them at the exact moment they connect. We can schedule your ad to run only at specific times — Friday afternoons, lunchtime, weekends — whatever matches your offer best.
What to charge
Pricing is genuinely venue-specific. A busy city-centre hotel with 200+ daily connections can command considerably more than a quiet rural café with 20. A sensible starting point is to calculate your approximate monthly Wi-Fi connection volume, decide on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) that feels fair for your market, and price from there. Many venues start conservatively — £50 to £150 per month per advertiser — and adjust as demand develops.
The key point: even at £75 per month, two advertisers cover a significant portion of — or in some cases the entire — monthly Fydelia platform fee. After that, the platform is running at no net cost, and any additional advertisers are pure margin.
Illustrative Revenue vs Platform Cost — Mid-Size Restaurant
What Does This Actually Earn?
Honest answer: it varies considerably, and anyone who quotes you a specific figure without knowing your venue’s footfall, location, and guest demographic is guessing.
What is more useful is to think about the revenue in tiers.
| Revenue Source | Effort to Set Up | Ongoing Effort | Revenue Type | Scales With |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Local advertising | Medium — requires outreach to local businesses | Low — passive once live | Monthly recurring | Number of advertisers and connection volume |
| Dweller flash offers | Low — configured in dashboard | Low — update offers periodically | Transactional uplift | Dwell time and offer relevance |
| Paid premium access | Low — tier configuration | Very low — runs automatically | Per-session or per-day | Business traveller volume |
| Scheduled promotions | Low — use existing marketing calendar | Medium — create seasonal campaigns | Drives own revenue | Campaign quality and session volume |
Realistic Expectations
The advertising revenue from a Wi-Fi splash page will not replace a significant revenue line in most venues. The right framing is: this is a mechanism to make your existing Wi-Fi cost-neutral or slightly profitable, while the promotional tools drive your own revenue. The combination — covering the platform cost through advertising while using the marketing tools to drive incremental bookings and upsells — is where the real commercial case sits.
How Fydelia Handles It Technically
Fydelia‘s advertising and promotional tools are built into the platform’s splash page and campaign management system. There is no additional technology required.
Ad cards and scheduled campaigns
Advertisers are configured as “AdCards” within the Fydelia dashboard. You upload the creative (or paste a link to it), set the display schedule — specific dates, times of day, days of week — and the system serves it automatically. Multiple advertisers can be rotated, shown in sequence, or displayed simultaneously depending on how you configure the page layout.
Dweller offers
Dweller offers are triggered by session duration. You set the trigger point — 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour — and the offer that appears. The guest sees a notification or overlay on their splash page when they next interact with it. The offer can link to your booking system, your menu, or any URL you choose.
Paid access tiers
Fydelia supports paid Wi-Fi access through its voucher and payment tools. Guests connecting to the free tier see an option to upgrade. Payment can be handled through the platform’s built-in tools or through an integration with your existing payment system. Bandwidth is allocated per tier automatically.
Analytics
The dashboard shows impression counts, click-through rates (where applicable), and session data. This gives you something concrete to show advertisers at renewal time — proof of delivery rather than a promise. You can also use the data to optimise which offers perform best at different times of day or for different guest segments.
If you want to check what connection speeds guests are currently experiencing before configuring paid tiers, you can speed test your Wi-Fi using fast.com — knowing your real-world speeds helps you set honest expectations for premium tier performance.
Practical Steps to Get Started
The revenue tools in Fydelia work from day one of deployment. Here is a sensible order of operations.
- Get the platform installed and configured first. Advertising on a badly performing Wi-Fi network is a short route to unhappy advertisers. Carden Hotspots surveys and optimises the underlying network as part of deployment. Start with a solid foundation.
- Run your own promotions for the first month. Before approaching external advertisers, use the splash page to promote your own offers — an upcoming event, a seasonal menu, a midweek special. This gives you a feel for the tooling and generates your first analytics data showing connection volumes and impression counts.
- Identify three to five potential local advertisers. Walk around your immediate area. Who serves a similar customer to yours? Who has a marketing budget but limited local reach? Make a shortlist before you have a conversation.
- Approach them with data. Your first month of analytics gives you real numbers — connections per week, peak connection times, guest demographics if captured. That is a much more compelling conversation than a theoretical pitch.
- Start with a short trial period. Offer the first advertiser a one-month trial at a reduced rate. It reduces their risk, and it gives you a proof of concept to show subsequent advertisers.
- Review and expand quarterly. Once you have one or two advertisers running consistently, review performance and approach the next tier of potential advertisers with updated data. This compounds over time — a venue with a waiting list of advertisers is in a strong negotiating position.
Revenue Tool Summary
Ad Cards
Scheduled local business adverts on splash page, managed in dashboard
Dweller Offers
Time-triggered promotions to guests already connected and on-site
Paid Access
Free basic tier plus paid premium — priced per session or per day
Campaigns
Seasonal and event-driven promotions scheduled in advance
Analytics
Impression counts and session data — proof of delivery for advertisers
Setup Effort
Low technical effort once installed — outreach to advertisers is the main work
What to Watch Next
The revenue tools in Fydelia are stable and well-developed. A few things are worth keeping in mind as you build out this part of your setup.
Advertiser demand in your area. The advertising revenue opportunity is location-dependent. A venue in a dense urban area with many nearby businesses will have an easier time finding and retaining advertisers than a rural venue with limited local commercial activity. Assessing local business density before building this into your commercial plan is sensible.
ASA guidelines on advertising. If you are selling advertising space to third parties, UK advertising standards (the ASA Code) apply to the creative content you display. Advertisers are responsible for their own copy, but as the publisher you have some responsibility for what appears on your splash page. This is a light-touch consideration for most venue-scale advertising, but worth being aware of.
Integration with your booking and EPOS systems. Fydelia’s integration ecosystem continues to grow. As it becomes easier to connect splash page promotions directly to booking flows — a guest sees a dinner offer and books from the same page — the conversion rate on promotional campaigns is likely to improve. Ask Carden Hotspots about current integration options when scoping your deployment.
For real-world examples of how these tools have worked in practice, check our case studies.
Frequently Asked Questions
More general questions? Read our FAQs.
Do I need to find advertisers myself, or does Fydelia do that?
Fydelia provides the technology to display advertising on your splash page. Finding and managing advertisers is your responsibility as the venue. Carden Hotspots can advise on how to approach local businesses and what to include in the pitch, but the commercial relationship with advertisers is yours to manage. This is actually an advantage — you know your local area and your guest demographic better than any third party does, which makes you the best person to identify and approach suitable advertisers.
Can we show our own promotions and local ads at the same time?
Yes. Fydelia’s splash page layout supports multiple content zones, and the scheduling tools allow you to control which content appears when. You might show your own seasonal promotion during lunchtime and switch to a local advertiser’s card during the afternoon. Or you might display both simultaneously in different sections of the page. The configuration is flexible and handled entirely from the dashboard — no coding required.
What format does advertising creative need to be in?
Fydelia’s AdCards support standard image formats and can link to an external URL. The exact dimensions and specifications are available in Fydelia’s documentation. For most local business advertisers, a simple branded image with a headline and call to action is sufficient — you do not need video or complex interactive formats. Carden Hotspots can provide guidance on briefing advertisers so they supply creative that works well in the splash page context.
Is paid Wi-Fi access worth the complexity for a small venue?
For most smaller hospitality venues — cafés, independent restaurants, small pubs — paid Wi-Fi access is probably not the right starting point. The revenue from a handful of daily premium upgrades is modest, and the configuration adds a layer of complexity that may not justify itself. Start with advertising and promotional tools first, and consider paid tiers if your venue attracts a meaningful volume of business travellers or guests who regularly need high-quality, extended connectivity for work.
How do we prove value to advertisers at renewal time?
Fydelia’s analytics dashboard provides impression data — how many times each AdCard was displayed during the billing period. This gives you a concrete, verifiable number to present at renewal. You can also share connection trend data showing peak periods and total monthly sessions. For advertisers used to social media or print advertising where impression data is standard, a monthly impressions report from a Wi-Fi platform is a familiar and credible format.
Can we sell advertising space before the system is installed?
In principle, yes — you could approach advertisers and take commitments before going live, using your current connection volume as an estimate of future impression delivery. In practice, it is easier to approach advertisers once you have a month of real analytics data showing actual connection volumes. The conversation is more credible with numbers than without them, and a one-month delay to gather data is a small cost for a more compelling pitch.
Ready to Turn Your Wi-Fi into a Revenue Tool?
The technology for all four revenue streams discussed here is included in the Fydelia platform. Getting it set up and working is a matter of installation, configuration, and — for the advertising element — a few conversations with local businesses.
Carden Hotspots handles the installation and platform configuration. The advertising outreach is yours to own — you know your local area, your guest profile, and the businesses around you far better than we do. We make sure the technology is ready; you decide how to fill it.
Carden Hotspots · Hospitality Wi-Fi Specialists
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A short call is enough to understand your venue’s footfall, existing setup, and which revenue tools make the most sense to prioritise. No commitment required — just an honest conversation about what is realistic for your site.Let’s Talk!Back to Overview
Carden Hotspots installs and manages guest Wi-Fi for hospitality venues across the UK. Powered by Fydelia.