Why the hotel, hostel or airport WiFi login page does not appear on your phone or laptop - the six things to try as a guest, and the four faults to look for if you run the network.
Public WiFi in hotels, hostels, cafés and airports usually uses a captive portal: you join an open network, and until you log in, the router sends every web request to a login page. Your phone also checks for this on its own - an iPhone fetches captive.apple.com, Android and Windows fetch addresses of their own - and when the reply is not what it expects, it opens the login sheet for you. The page fails to appear when either of those two things goes wrong: the redirect does not reach you, or the phone’s check is answered or blocked.
In this order. The first one fixes most cases.
Type http://neverssl.com into the browser. HTTPS sites such as Google cannot be redirected by the network, so the login page never appears on them. An unencrypted address can be, and the portal opens.
A VPN app, or Android's Private DNS (Settings > Network > Private DNS), sends your traffic around the hotel network, so the redirect never reaches you. Switch it off until you have logged in, then back on.
Forget the WiFi network, switch WiFi off for ten seconds, and join again. This clears an old session the router still remembers and makes the phone run its portal check afresh.
iPhones and Android phones can change their WiFi MAC address. If you logged in earlier and the phone has since changed address, the network sees a new device. Turn private address off for the hotel network only.
If the page opened but the internet stops, the session may have reached its time, data or device limit. The front desk can see this on the dashboard of a managed network.
Still nothing? Ask the front desk for the login address of the router itself. Many networks, including iberry's, also serve the login page from the router, so it opens even when the internet behind it is down.
Each of these has come up on real hotel networks we have taken over. All four are configuration, not hardware.
iPhones decide whether to show the login sheet by fetching captive.apple.com and checking the reply. An installer who adds a static DNS entry for that name - often as an attempted fix - makes the network answer for Apple, and the iPhone concludes there is no portal. Android keeps working, which is why this one is missed for months. Remove the entry.
The walled garden lists sites a device may reach before logging in. A match-all entry, or a whole IP range, lets unauthenticated devices straight out to the internet - so the portal never appears because the phone never needs it, and guests go online without any login or record.
If the router's DNS is slow or broken, the redirect itself fails. And a portal served only over HTTPS with a certificate the phone does not trust will show a security warning instead of a login page.
A portal hosted in the cloud cannot load if the property's internet line is down, and to guests that looks like a portal fault. A local fallback login page on the router, and a second line with automatic failover, keep guests online.
A quick test after any change: join the guest network on an iPhone and on an Android phone with mobile data switched off. On both, the login sheet should open within a few seconds without touching the browser. If it opens only on Android, start with the first fault above. On MikroTik hotspots, the walled garden and DNS static entries are both under IP > Hotspot and IP > DNS; our MikroTik services team can check a router remotely.
The phone connected to the network but never received the redirect to the login page. The usual reasons are that you tried an HTTPS website first, which cannot be redirected; the phone's automatic portal check was answered or blocked; Private DNS or a VPN is sending traffic around the hotel network; or the device was already logged in under an old, expired session.
Turn off any VPN and Private DNS, then open a plain-HTTP address such as http://neverssl.com in the browser. Because it is not encrypted, the network can redirect it, and the login page appears. If that fails, forget the network, switch WiFi off and on, and join again.
iPhones and iPads decide whether to show the login sheet by fetching captive.apple.com. If the network answers that request itself - for example with a static DNS entry added by an installer - the iPhone concludes there is no portal and stays silent. Removing the entry restores the sheet. Android checks a different address, so it can keep working.
Either the session has a limit that has been reached - time, data or the number of devices allowed for the room - or the network's DNS is failing behind the portal. Ask the front desk to check your session; on an iberry network they can see it, and its limits, on the dashboard.
A real portal asks for something the property gave you - a room number and surname, a voucher or a code sent to your phone. Be wary of any login page that asks for card details or an email password, and use HTTPS sites or a VPN after login for anything sensitive.
iberry runs managed guest WiFi for hotels, hostels and campuses: the portal, the login system and the router configuration, monitored so a login page that stops opening is noticed before the guests notice. See hotel WiFi software and pricing.
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