One of the modern amenities we always look for when booking a hotel room is that it has wifi. However, there are considerations and issues.

When using the hotel wireless network, you are a part of a network with many hundreds of other hotel guests. Innocent and anonymous, family, corporate, hotel guests. And possibly hackers and generally anyone up to no good. They could potentially snoop and view your unencrypted browsing activity. They could scan your laptop and leverage an existing vulnerability.

Traveling from one hotel to another, it can be tedious to enter the hotel wifi passcode to your 10 wireless devices to get connected each time you book into a new hotel (your devices, your spouse’s, your kids’).

You may think the hotel wifi is encrypted because you had to enter a passcode to get connected, but that is not necessarily true. The wireless network may simply require you to login using your room number and last name in order to be authorized to get connected, but that does not necessarily mean the connection is encrypted.

You could use a VPN to encrypt all your internet activity, but you still have to set up all your devices to connect to the hotel wifi first. And you need to have a VPN subscription/setup.

So, how can we secure our wireless connectivity to the hotel wireless network a little bit more?

One of the easiest solutions is to use a travel router. They range in cost from $30 to several hundred. They could be as small as a matchbox or a pack of cards. They could have all the features of a home router, and more. They can be setup as a router, a bridge, a wireless repeater, an access point, a firewall; some even have a SIM card slot so that you can connect to a cellular network and have multiple devices share the internet connection. Others can be setup as a file server or even have a battery, so it can be a free-standing device with no cable attachments.

On a recent multi city trip, I brought along one of these – a RAVPower FileHub Plus, reviewed in this article. I’d set it up before traveling into bridge mode, with my own non-broadcasting SSID with WPA2 encryption. I connected my laptop, phone and tablet to it, and saved the wireless connection details on each device.

After checking into each hotel, I’d connect my laptop or tablet to the router device, and setup its WAN connection – if I connect the device to the hotel room Ethernet, then there’s no need for this step. Otherwise, I would setup the device to connect its WAN to the hotel wireless. Then immediately, all my other devices would have internet connectivity, through my own router, encrypted.

If the hotel wireless network requires a login first, like you have to enter your room number and name, you would do that once, from a browser on any of the devices, then all the other devices would immediately have internet access. Easy. Secured. (Well, as secure as WPA2 can be.)

Connecting to a hotel wireless connection has some considerations – it may not be encrypted and you are connecting to a network where your device is easily visible to all several hundred others. Take some simple precautionary steps to create an additional layer of security around your devices.

Be safe…