At your service? London's Dorchester Hotel
provides an 'e-butler' service but an hour
of high-speed broadband costs £18.50Wi-Fi zones may be springing up across Europe but a new survey shows that getting online while travelling can still be costly and difficult. Even checking in to a five-star hotel may not mean complimentary Wi-Fi access.

Five-star hotels across the continent are charging on average £14.17 (or €21) per day for internet access - as much as you might pay for a whole month of Wi-Fi at home, according to the survey. The research was carried out by Webaroo, a company offering free software for browsing downloaded web content offline.

London wins yet another "most expensive" tag for playing host to the priciest Wi-Fi charges at five-star hotels, with 24 hours of access costing on average £19.70 (or €29.08). Munich comes second (€25.32), closely followed by Paris (€21.20), Rome (€19.60) and Barcelona (€19.60).

And the rip-off doesn't end at the airport. The survey found that airport internet access charges were nearly as high as those at five-star hotels, at an average of £12.82 (€19) for 24 hours of net use.