Five hundred megabytes. That's exactly how far a free VPN app got me before it cut off mid-episode of University Challenge, leaving the screen frozen on a half-finished question. I'd grabbed it from the App Store in a scramble, sitting on a scratchy hotel bedspread in Roma Norte, certain it would hold me over on the hotel wifi until I found something better. It didn't hold me over for even twenty minutes.
A quick disclosure before anything else: this post includes affiliate links, and if you sign up for a VPN through one of them, I get a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only talk about services I've actually paid for and used while trying to get work done — and watch terrible quiz shows — in flats and hotel rooms from Lisbon to Bangkok. More detail on how that works sits in my transparency policy, if you want the fine print.
The Invisibility Cloak I Believed In
When I left London in 2022, I pictured a VPN as something like a digital invisibility cloak — click connect, vanish, and nobody on the hotel network can touch you. After a lot of bad hotel wifi since then, that's not really how any of this works. A VPN like the ones I actually pay for does run your traffic through AES-256 encryption, and that's the part that stops a stranger on the same network from casually reading what you're sending. But for someone living out of a suitcase, the real value is steadier than any cloak: it's the thing standing between an open hotel network and whatever you're sending over it, hotel after hotel.
Why Does Hotel WiFi Even Care About a Travel VPN?
Hotel wifi isn't just slow — it's an obstacle course, and most of what trips people up isn't the speed. I remember a rainy stretch in Bangkok where my partner had back-to-back video calls all day, and every single time he connected, the hotel's network would spot the encrypted tunnel and just drop it. We weren't even trying to watch anything; we were trying to work. Switching ExpressVPN over to its Lightway setting was the one thing that got us through that week without the calls cutting out every twenty minutes, and I still don't fully understand why — I just know it worked when nothing else did. Some VPNs also run what's called an obfuscated server, built specifically so a hotel firewall can't tell you're using a VPN at all, which is one step further than I've personally needed to go, though I know other long-term travelers who swear by it.
And then there's the login page problem — the one asking for your room number and surname — which gets its own special kind of frustrating when a VPN's kill switch is too aggressive to let that screen through in the first place. That particular headache got its own post eventually, over on The Late-Night University Challenge Crisis, because trying to summarize it here kept turning into three extra paragraphs.
Working From a Lisbon Café Taught Me to Stop Trusting Shared Networks
Lisbon is where I actually do most of my design work, and a cafe near LX Factory is where I learned that "public wifi" and "trustworthy" aren't the same sentence. The wifi there was fast, properly fast, but I kept getting hit with endless captchas every time I tried to search for anything — Google wanted me to identify every bus and fire hydrant in a six-block radius before it would let me past the search bar. That's apparently a shared-IP problem (something about a dedicated IP fixing it, which I've read about but never tested myself), and it's annoying enough that I keep CyberGhost VPN around as a backup specifically for its streaming-labelled servers and a 45-day money-back window, still the longest refund period I've come across in this space. A friend of mine who lives in Lisbon full-time, the kind of person who surfs at Caparica beach every single weekend she's in town, rain or not, thinks I'm slightly unwell for caring this much about a quiz show stuck behind a captcha wall. She might be right. Some VPNs also let you split specific apps out of the tunnel entirely, so a banking app connects normally while everything else stays routed through the VPN — handy, though not something I've needed to lean on hard yet.
The BBC Problem Nobody Really Warns You About
BBC iPlayer is the real reason I pay for two VPN subscriptions instead of one. Streaming-unblock problems with it work differently than almost anything else I deal with — iPlayer isn't just asking whether you're outside the UK, it's actively hunting for traffic coming from known VPN data centers, and once a server gets tagged, no valid UK TV License number is going to rescue you. Around week eight of one particularly stubborn stretch based out of Roma Norte, both of my usual London servers died within days of each other, and I lost two evenings bouncing between options before one finally held.
None of that really explains why it matters this much to me, though. A while back, stuck in the corner of a café in Bangkok after a day where nothing had gone right, I finally got the University Challenge theme tune to crackle out of my laptop speakers, and I felt my shoulders drop by a good two inches, the specific, slightly embarrassing relief of a quiz show starting on time, thousands of miles from anywhere that quiz show is actually broadcast.
Server-switching like that — hopping to a new address the second one stops working — is basically the whole game with iPlayer, and proxy-detection errors are just the scoreboard telling you you've lost a round for now. I put together a fuller comparison of how different brands handle this in NordVPN on Hotel WiFi, if you want to see how it stacks up against what I've described here with ExpressVPN.
So, Is a VPN Actually Enough on Hotel Wifi?
There's no single rule that sums this up, but after this many hotel rooms, I've landed on a rough checklist instead of a bullet list nobody actually follows. Checking the protocol setting first is usually worth it — if a connection feels wonky, switching away from the oldest default option tends to fix most of it within a few minutes. Turning on the kill switch matters more in places where power and wifi both flicker, so your laptop doesn't quietly fall back onto the open network the second the VPN drops. Testing the connection the moment you check in, rather than at nine at night when you actually want to watch something, saves a specific kind of frustration I've felt too many times to count.
Device limits matter more than people expect once there are two of you traveling with a laptop, a phone, and a tablet each — ExpressVPN covers my setup at eight simultaneous connections, which is plenty until it very nearly isn't. Hotel smart TVs are their own battle entirely: half the remotes I've picked up have one button that's supposed to open a smart hub, and nine times out of ten it launches some bloated preloaded app I've never asked for instead of the one I actually want, which is usually the moment I give up and route things through a travel router instead. Smart DNS setups exist for exactly this kind of TV, and they're worth knowing about even if I still reach for a travel router first out of habit. I've written up the actual workarounds, button by button, in my guide to hotel TV workarounds, because trying to explain it in one paragraph here doesn't do it justice.
Traffic throttling is the other quiet culprit — a hotel capping bandwidth during peak hours will make a VPN look broken when really it's just the wifi itself gasping for air, and no amount of server-switching fixes a connection that was never going to handle 4K in the first place. Even catalogue differences between countries trip people up: a show sitting right there on Netflix in one country can vanish entirely once you cross a border, which has nothing to do with your VPN and everything to do with licensing deals nobody tells you about.
A VPN isn't the invisibility cloak I thought it was back in 2022, but it's become the one piece of travel gear I'd genuinely replace a lost suitcase before I'd go without. It won't stop a bad decision on a phishing email, and it can't make hotel wifi faster than it actually is. What it's taught me, slowly and through a lot of failed hotel-room setups, is to test things early, keep a backup running, and stop expecting any single VPN to solve every problem on every network. If you're starting from zero and want somewhere sensible to begin, the current offer on ExpressVPN is still what I point people toward first — not because it's flawless, but because it's gotten my own setup through more hotel wifi disasters than anything else I've paid for.