Vacation rental maxing out on Comcast 1TB usage

[Erin Carson]

Hi Folks, wondering if anyone has any experience or advice with this:

We own a short-term rental in Florida that we just launched in July of this year. We've done great thus far and have had it pretty much fully booked since listing it.

Comcast is our internet provider and allows 1TB of data. Well.....we had one of the renters almost use the full TB for the week they were there. I'm assuming they were a photographer or something of that nature to use enough to hit the limit. Luckily we didn't exceed the 1TB but Comcast will charge $10 for every 50GB thereafter.

Anyway, how do you handle this? In this case the renter was there towards the end of the month, but had they been there at the beginning, we almost certainly would have exceeded 1TB and been forced to pay additional fees (assuming other renters used normal amounts of data). Was this just an anomaly or is this something we should expect and try to mitigate?

Thanks for the help!

[Bob Wilson]

@Erin Carson I have Comcast here in Chicago, and yes, while 1TB is sufficient, it is risky. After this happened twice to me, we upgraded all 15 units to unlimited data. Cost impact is about $11 per account here in Chicago. 

Specifically ask for "XFi" when calling the service rep.

In my opinion, it's worth it because now I don't have to monitor 15 accounts, I just let folks do what they want. If the $11 is the issue, charge a $11 fee somehow n the front end, but I would imagine, this won't break you either way :)