How to make the most of hotel WiFi
Hotel WiFi can be your saviour when travelling, but it comes with its own risks and limitations.
This is old news in Scotland, but for the rest of the United Kingdom, the school summer holidays have just started.
As a result, millions of people will spend at least a portion of the next six weeks away from home.
Some will go camping and others will go caravanning, while most of us will visit hotels and B&Bs either domestically or overseas.
Once ensconced in our rooms, we’ll expect a decent view, clean bedding, a hearty breakfast and respectably fast hotel WiFi.
It’s remarkable to think how important holiday WiFi has become, not just as an umbilical cord to our lives back home, but for itineraries and entertainments alike.
Although we gleefully anticipate leaving work behind, we don’t leave the stresses of smartphone ownership behind.
Indeed, tourists tend to be in closer proximity to their phones than ever.
Alongside essential holiday activities like route planning, e-ticket access and last-minute event bookings, phones also substitute for the TVs and games consoles left at home.
It’s crucial to know how to get the most out of supplied hotel WiFi, avoiding unexpected bills on your return home…
Remember hotel WiFi isn’t secure
We don’t mean the signal itself is insecure, but rather the data sent and received across it.
If you can connect to a public WiFi network with a shared password, so can other people.
And if you’re sending unencrypted wireless data through the air, bad actors can intercept and read those activities, from emails to banking requests.
You won’t know this is happening in a hotel because the culprit could be in a neighbouring room or sat in a restaurant, tapping away on their laptop in the usual manner.
Public WiFi offers no defence against this sort of interception, which is why we urge anyone logged onto insecure networks to access the internet through a paid VPN or the Tor browser.
This ensures any data sent or received (it’s equally vulnerable in either direction) is fully encrypted against man-in-the-middle attacks or any attempt at tampering or spying.
With that said, free hotel WiFi remains a rich resource…
Log on and save your data
It’s easy to generate huge data bills when you’re overseas, as an SNP politician discovered in 2023 when his children racked up £11,000 in roaming charges on a Parliamentary iPad.
Avoid a similar fate by connecting to the hotel WiFi network and storing it so your device automatically reconnects whenever you re-enter the building.
Check the WiFi signal on your device is displaying before launching into a gaming marathon/streaming a Netflix film/making a Zoom call to the folks back home.
Although the wireless networks provided by hotels are rarely ultrafast, they should be sufficient to support one of these activities at a time.
Some hotels offer premium WiFi as a paid upgrade, which might be worth considering if you’re likely to have more than one device connected at any given moment.
Connecting to a WiFi network doesn’t give you carte blanche to download an entire series of Prison Break or use your laptop for P2P file sharing, and fair usage policies often apply.
We’d recommend downloading songs, series and offline-compatible games in advance of your holiday, to avoid unduly taxing the hotel’s connection.
Similarly, plunder hotel connectivity before leaving each morning to map out routes, taking screenshots of booking confirmations and other data which will be useful that day.
Technical tips
An Ethernet cable may not be a sexy addition to your suitcase, but if your hotel has LAN ports, it’ll provide a faster and more stable connection.
Connectivity tends to bog down in the evenings but be quicker in the daytime, which is worth bearing in mind if you’re struggling to maintain a Zoom or Teams connection.
A travel router may enable you to connect more devices than the hotel’s policies permit (often capped at one device), though it won’t accelerate available connection speeds.
Finally, far-flung rooms may have weaker connections than lobbies, so investigate whether you get a better signal in communal areas and conduct data-intensive activities there instead.
