Rather than choosing between waiting out a slow VPN reconnect after hotel wifi drops or carrying hardware through airport security, the real question buried under most "best travel VPN" debates for anyone trying to keep streaming unblocked as a digital nomad is what works for your situation. After comparing NordVPN and ExpressVPN across three very different hotel networks, I still don't think there's one right answer, just a right answer for whatever wifi you're currently swearing at.
Quick disclosure before anything else: this site runs on affiliate links, including the one right here for NordVPN. If you sign up through it, I get a commission and you don't pay anything extra — standard arrangement, and I only put a product on this page after actually paying for it and dragging it through a real trip. A reader named Zoya Mirza wrote in from Doha not long ago asking almost this exact question — she'd moved from Manchester for a finance role, lost access to BBC iPlayer and her old Netflix library, and had already tried six different VPNs with no luck. She specifically wanted a written breakdown rather than a video, so here's mine.
Here's where I've landed on Nord versus Express, in short: NordVPN wins when the network itself is actively working against you — throttled, DNS-hijacked, or blocking VPN traffic outright. ExpressVPN wins when the wifi is merely mediocre and what you actually want is the fastest possible reconnect without touching a server list. Everything below is the evidence for that, gathered from wifi that ranged from sluggish to openly hostile.
NordVPN vs ExpressVPN: Two Ways to Handle the Same Hotel Wifi Problem
Nord's approach is brute force and options — a server network well past six thousand machines worldwide, several labelled for specific streaming services so you're not guessing, and room for ten devices at once. Express bets the other way: fewer servers, only eight simultaneous connections, but apps that look genuinely polished across phone, laptop, and smart TV, plus a Lightway protocol built to reconnect fast the moment you jump from hotel wifi to airport wifi to mobile data. Surfshark skips the device cap entirely if that number worries you most, though its smaller server list makes streaming a little less consistent once you're switching countries every few weeks.
Chasing a Stable Connection in Bangkok
Bangkok is where Nord actually earned its keep. The hotel wifi was throttling hard — the kind of restriction hotels use so one guest doesn't hog the whole connection — and on top of that, the network seemed to flag and block VPN traffic outright. Before I figured that part out, I'd tried something dumber: buying a UK SIM card, on the theory that a British phone number might convince iPlayer I was still a resident. It did nothing, because streaming platforms check your connection's location, not your phone's home country, and I'd wasted an evening on a fix that was never going to work.
What actually got me through was switching to Nord's obfuscated servers, which disguise VPN traffic as regular browsing so a network that's actively hostile to VPNs can't tell the difference. If you've hit a wifi network that blocks VPNs outright, How NordVPN Obfuscated Servers Help with Strict Hotel Wi-Fi Networks covers exactly that fix in more depth than I can here. There's a small, satisfying click when the app locks onto a new server, and I heard it a dozen times that night working through the list until one finally held.
The University Challenge theme tune finally came through clean in a café near my hotel, and I felt my shoulders drop about two inches — a genuinely small thing to get that worked up about, but travel does strange things to your relationship with a quiz show.
What Went Wrong With Mexico City's Wifi?
Roma Norte gave me a different problem entirely: a hotel that forced a captive portal login every time my laptop went to sleep, which was constant, given how often my partner's video calls kept both of us on and off the connection at odd hours. Every reconnect got caught by the hotel's own DNS hijacking until I logged back into their splash page — which meant the VPN reconnect and the hotel's login screen were fighting each other in a loop neither one was going to win alone.
Nord's Threat Protection feature turned out to be the unexpected fix here, flagging a handful of trackers the hotel's login page was quietly trying to load. Once those were blocked and the tunnel actually held, the encryption running underneath — the same AES-256 standard ExpressVPN uses — mattered more than usual, since I was checking bank balances over a network I didn't trust at all.
Streaming sites also cross-check your browser's own location settings against your VPN's, separately from the network itself, which is worth remembering before you assume the VPN is the only thing giving you away. For similar regional headaches, What I Learned Watching Channel 4 Outside UK for British TV holds up for almost any streaming service fighting an aggressive hotel firewall.
What's Different Between a Doha Flat and a Bangkok Hotel?
A friend named Yemi Adesanya, who went fully remote before I did and has never once let me forget it, texted asking whether Zoya's situation in Doha was actually the same as mine in Bangkok. Yemi keeps her own running spreadsheet of every VPN outage she's hit since she started traveling, so she's usually the one who spots the pattern before I do — and her answer was no, not even close.
Zoya's wifi in her apartment in Doha works fine. Nothing throttled, nothing hijacking DNS, no VPN-blocking — iPlayer and her old Netflix library are just geographically off-limits, full stop. That's a straightforward job for either Nord or Express: connect to a UK or US server and you're through, because the network itself isn't fighting back. Bangkok and Mexico City were a different category of problem, active interference stacked on top of the geo-block, which is exactly why obfuscation and Threat Protection mattered there and wouldn't have mattered nearly as much for Zoya.
That distinction is the whole reason I can't give one flat answer to "which VPN should I use." If your wifi is simply unhelpful, almost anything Nord, Express, or even Surfshark offers will get you through, and app polish or price becomes the deciding factor. If your wifi is actively hostile, the specialty features — obfuscated servers, tracker-blocking, a server list deep enough to have backups for your backups — start to matter more than which app looks nicer. (I did try a travel router for a stretch, since one device covering everything sounded appealing, but it added its own headaches and I went back to running the app on each device instead.) I ran into a version of this same fork of situations while figuring out How to Watch HBO Max in Europe While Traveling from US — sometimes the fix is trivial, sometimes it isn't, and which app you reach for depends entirely on which kind of problem you've actually got.
The Verdict: Two Solid VPNs for Different Travelers
So — Nord or Express? If your wifi is openly hostile (blocking VPNs, hijacking DNS, throttling until a stream turns to mush), NordVPN's specialty servers and Threat Protection are built for exactly that fight, and I'd pick it every time over ExpressVPN. If your wifi is merely slow and unreliable rather than actively working against you, Express's faster reconnects and cleaner apps across phone, laptop, and smart TV are worth the extra cost, and you'll probably never touch a server list at all. And if you want a service that spells out "for BBC iPlayer" and "for Netflix US" right in the server list, so there's no guessing involved, CyberGhost's 45-day money-back guarantee (against Nord's 30) makes it a low-risk way to try — though its speeds drop more than the other two on longer, transatlantic-style connections, which matters if you're bouncing between continents the way I do.
Nord's mobile app still occasionally needs a manual server pick before iPlayer stops throwing an error at me — a small, recurring annoyance rather than a dealbreaker, but worth knowing before you assume you're one tap away from a working stream every single time. Customer support chat can also take a while during busier hours, which matters if you're the type who wants an answer immediately rather than waiting it out.
None of this fixed everything on the first try. Zoya, last I heard, ended up running Nord for iPlayer and switching to Express whenever she's on a work trip with genuinely bad hotel wifi — which is roughly the split I'd recommend to anyone asking me the same question she did.