Tech on Toast · Nov 11, 2026 · 48m · 38m saved
With Steve Parkinson, Founder and CEO of Fydelia
A guest Wi-Fi login page cost a London hospitality group about £450 a year in 2017. Steve Parkinson, founder and CEO of Fydelia, told Chris Fletcher on Tech on Toast that the quote struck him as too expensive, and that the business he built to undercut it now runs guest Wi-Fi for Black Sheep, Costa Coffee, Domino's and Dishoom with six people.
Most software vendors sell AI as a feature. Steve uses it to clear out the busy work behind the scenes, and in a slow summer his team worked out it had done years of work in weeks.
"In July and August... the lead flow was down... but here's the eye opener: in those two months, we calculated we did about two and a half years of work." — Steve Parkinson
Steve built Fydelia without ever studying the competition, kept every customer on free service through the pandemic, and has held one flat price for nine years.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 48 minutes of audio, 10 minutes of reading.
Here are the 10 lessons that matter.
Key Takeaways
Steve and his team calculated they did about two and a half years of work in two months using AI
Fydelia switched every customer to free service during COVID, and the trust it earned built the client list
Guest Wi-Fi is about 90% of a guest's first digital interaction with a venue, in Steve's estimate
He calls it a hygiene standard, as basic as clean bathrooms
Data should only be asked for when the guest is told why, especially as younger guests guard it more closely
Steve expects hospitality software prices to rise next year, because AI is not free to run
Order at table is the technology Steve would cut first, to keep the human side of service
1. A £450 Quote Started Fydelia
Fydelia began in 2017, when the hospitality group Pontis, which ran a restaurant above London's Liverpool Street Station, asked Steve to build a guest Wi-Fi "splash page," the screen a guest sees before getting online.
Steve Parkinson thought the going rate was too high, and that venues should run their own
"Normally the going rate's about £450 a year [for a Wi-Fi splash page]... that's probably too expensive. But also, why can't people do their own? So that's really when Fydelia was born." — Steve Parkinson
Fydelia never benchmarked its rivals, and that turned into a pricing difference. The industry charged per access point, the individual wireless router, while Fydelia charged per venue because nobody had told it otherwise.
"We never really checked out the competition... it just meant we accidentally pioneered a few things, like we were doing per-venue charging. We had no clue that companies usually charge per access point." — Steve Parkinson
