If you’re doing a road trip in an electric car, the ideal approach is to charge for a good price–ideally free to guests–at your hotel. Not only is charging while you sleep the most convenient, most “fast chargers” bill a very high price which can mean a cost per mile that approaches that of gasoline. EV buyers didn’t buy an EV to pay that much for energy.
If you’re taking a recreational road trip, not driving more than 3-4 hours/day, you can often do all your charging at hotels. If you’re on a hard-slog and driving 6-10 hours, you will need one or more fast charges. Even so, you can get your average cost down with hotel charging, and get the boon of zero-wait charging while you sleep, with no detours and less stress on your battery.
In the early days, there were few EVs, but you could find hotels with charging and most offered it free to guests. Tesla freely gave regular “level 2” overnight EVSEs (the real name for these things called “chargers”) to thousands of hotels who put them in to attract guests. Tesla wanted to tell buyers they could road trip easily to those hotels. Tesla didn’t forbid the hotels from charging, but most did not. There was no mechanism to charge built into the units. You could almost always find a hotel at your destination which offered free charging to guests.
On a recent road trip in the west, I found that this had become harder. The culprit, oddly, was Tesla, which had started the pattern of charging being free. Tesla added a system to let hotels bill for charging easily. It works “plug and play” like the Tesla superchargers. Drivers just plug in, and it’s billed on their registered credit card at a price set by the hotel, which keeps most of the money. Many hotels, however, have set a high-profit price similar to the price of the fast chargers and other public charging stations which hope to be a business. That’s instead of thinking of them as an amenity to attract more guests. Because they are so convenient, they hope to be both.
Hotels that put in non-Tesla EVSEs still often got simple ones without billing. These are much cheaper to install, and much simpler, so they are much more reliable. Those that have billing have tended to set high prices similar to public chargers. Those without billing have either been free to guests, or a flat nightly fee was charged, either on an honour system, or by having a key or switch to turn it on, so that once you paid the front desk, they turned on a charge port for you. The most common price I’ve seen at hotels for that has been $20. That’s pretty high for average cars that might take just 40-50kWh in a night when low, it’s more than the cost of a fast charger. For cars that are half full, it’s an exorbitant price. For empty electric pick-up trucks with 90kWh batteries, it’s a decent price.
Unfortunately, charging at hotels takes work today, though it’s getting easier. A few hotel search sites like hotels.com and booking.com let you search for hotels that have charging, but they don’t tell you the cost. A hotel with free-to-guests charging is easily worth a premium of $20-$25 for the typical driver if they can plan for it. A hotel with higher priced charging is worth it only for the convenience.
The hope was that hotels would offer charging free to guests the way most mid-priced road hotels offer breakfast free as a way to attract guests. This still happens, but it’s getting more rare and the trend looks bad. This might change if hotel search tools let drivers easily distinguish between hotels which have free-to-guest charging, those with modestly priced charging, and those with high-profit charging at gasoline-level prices. Guests will naturally prefer the former, and hotels would learn that.
Road Trip Results
On a recent road trip in California, Las Vegas and Arizona, I charged at two hotels that charged $20, and three more that used Tesla billing. At 5 hotels I got charging free-to-guests. Almost all the rest of my charging came from fast chargers (particularly on the sections in California which involved all-day driving.) I stayed 6 nights in hotels without charging, instead fast charging during dinner. (I almost never wait while charging, instead I hotel charge while sleeping, and fast charge during lunch or dinner while eating.)
In the end I spent $269 on electricity and went 3,018 miles. In a 25mpg car that would be $3.33/gallon – slightly higher than the $3 average in Arizona, much better than the $4.20/gallon California price. At home, thanks to solar power, I pay a price around 2.5 cents/mile, equivalent to $0.65/gallon for all my local driving, which is a huge win, and makes up for not doing as well on a road trip.
In each city though, it was harder to find hotels with free-to-guests or moderately priced charging. In several cases, hotels that used to offer that had changed. At Barstow factory outlets, there are 2 hotels next to a bank of Tesla destination chargers that used to be free, now they are 35 cents/kWh. Formerly free chargers at several other hotels now had much higher prices.
One boon of hotel charging is you, in many cars, reheat the car’s battery and interior just before leaving using the EVSE power. That’s very useful in cold places, as a cold battery has less range. A nice feature for cars would be a mode to keep the car just above freezing even when not charging, so people could leave things in the car and know they won’t freeze.
Getting a stall
One issue for drivers is knowing they will get a stall. Now that many people drive EVs, hotels with just 1 or 2 stalls are much more likely to fill up. If you’re depending on a charge, or picked the hotel because of its chargers, you may be out of luck. You may also have a stall but then fear going out in the evening for risk of losing it, since what matters is having it overnight for a full charge. Today, almost no hotels have a system to reserve chargers. Those who do charge a fee may be willing to allow this if you pay the fee in advance. In fact, the best system may be to have a modest fee, of $5 to $10, that reserves the stall and covers the hotel’s cost of electricity. (At the national average electricity price of 17 cents, the typical cost will be around $8, less than the cost of the free breakfast for two. Cheaper if there are lower night rates.) High priced stalls are less likely to be used, people will only pay $20 if they are low and actually need it.
One hotel I stayed at had only one 3kw stall. That’s not enough to charge a car fully, but if you have it all night, can make a big contribution, good for around 120 miles. If 2 or more guests wanted it, they did take the phone numbers and limited each guest to 4 hours, though that’s not particularly useful for any car–the real solution should have been to put in more stalls, ideally with more power or sharing power. Today, 4 stalls tends to avoid contention, but in future as more people drive electric it will be more. The River Lodge in Laughlin has 6 stalls (and fast chargers) but made them the best parking spaces at the hotel. When I arrived, 5 had gasoline cars in them, so I could have easily gotten no charge. Because hotels generally make no efforts to enforce rules on stalls, it’s actually better if they are put in inconvenient places, at least for now.
The Future of Hotel Charging
It’s surprising how little attention has been given to hotel charging, considering it’s the most convenient and cheapest way to charge EVs on trips, and a sure way to attract EV drivers to a hotel. For more to happen, the following steps are recommended:
- More hotels need stalls, and enough of them that drivers need not worry if they will get one. Drivers need to have a stall all night, usually, unless they just need a top-up.
- Hotels must pick their pricing style. Free-to-guests will be the first choice of all guests, but of course that has a cost. Next, guests will prefer either reasonable pricing (retail plus a modest margin) for the electricity. Hotels that decide to price like public charging (30 cents/kWh to 45 cents, or $20 flat) should understand this will bring in some revenue, but not attract nearly as many guests. Are they in the business of selling electricity, or selling room-nights?
- If there aren’t enough stalls, reservations make sense. This should be built into hotel reservation systems (and online reservation networks) or at the very least be doable over the phone or online, with a reasonable fee.
- Special charging EVSEs for hotels are needed that support the idea of reservations. They should also detect if cars park in the space but don’t plug in or don’t have a reservation, perhaps making an alarm if this happens or messaging the front desk or tow company. EVSEs with screens can display the reserved guests name.
- Online hotel search tools should have more support for finding hotels with charging, showing the price, noting an ability for reservations and even allowing the booking of reservations when booking the hotel. Charger reliability is also important to know. (Today, the Plugshare site/app is the best tool for finding price and availability.)
