Travel Router

Using a Roku or Amazon Fire Stick in a hotel is easier with a travel router.

My wife and I spend about 10 nights a year in hotels. Some hotels, like most Spring Hill Suites, have TVs that allow you to sign in to your own streaming service. That is nice. Other hotels, like Hampton, Hyatt and others typically have a good offering of "scheduled broadcast channels", but either no on-demand movies or expensive pay-per -view on-demand movies. It is easy to wish you could just use your own Roku or Fire Stick.

If the TV has a HDMI port on the back then you have options. To make this work, there are typically two issues to overcome. One is the common problem of switching the TV to the previously unused HDMI port. I overcome this by carrying a universal remote and a remote that I know works with my favorite hotel. Fiddling with the three buttons of the bottom of the TV would also work. The other problem is making the hotel's network happy with your device(s). My research discovered this YouTube video from Dave Plumber https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYxQ4Lvqn14. I am not employed by them, nor do I benefit from their sales. But I do benefit by having a better hotel stay.

The travel router Dave recommends is the GL.iNet P/N GL-ATX1800. I got mine from Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B2J7WSDK.

It took me about 15 minutes to set it up for the first time. It was a cycle of reading the menus, reading the manual, Google something and go around again. If I had a little time to go through this and make clean notes it would have been fast and easy. With clean notes I think this could be set up in a hotel in about one minute, two at most.

My wife was waiting on the TV, so I didn't get to start over and clean up my notes. I did note that in the menu structure I used:

• NETWORK -> Guest Network -> DHCP server
• WIRELESS -> turn on and off WiFi bands and set passwords

In addition, I initially had some trouble signing into the hotel network. It is common to either have to sign in with last name and room number or other sign-in credentials. This link was very helpful https://docs.gl-inet.com/router/en/3/tutorials/connect_to_a_hotspot_with_captive_portal/. I signed in with no problem.

There are many things that the travel router can do. Some of them are:

• Use your laptop to sign in to hotel WiFi. All of your Roku, Fire Stick, phone, tablet and other devices can then access the internet through your router without hotel restrictions.
• You can VPN (Virtual Private Network) into your home computer(s). This allows access to home media. It also allows encryption to be used through the hotel network thus enhancing security.
• Numerous other networking features and controls are available, all beyond the scope of this posting.

In summary, there is a specific hotel we go to about 6 times a year. I can walk in the door and get my NetFlix and Sling accounts running on the room's big TV, using my FireStick, in about 2 minutes (after unpacking them and booting my laptop). Sometimes technology is nice.