Just spoke to Premier Inn WiFi support as connection just drops every time my users VPN in and was told that they block VPNs! Yes, even on paid for ULTIMATE.
In my opinion, that’s alienating a lot of their business customers who work in the evenings and seems very short sighted- our company has since closed the account and won’t be staying there.
to: Corpo Bookings
cc: HR, Manager, whoever else cares
RE: Premier Inn bookings no longer have IT support
It has come to our attention that Premier Inn hotels actively block VPN connectivity. IT will not be supporting anyone that stays at the Premier Inn line of hotels.
This will give me a great excuse to go to a better chain, awesome.
This isn’t a new thing AFAIK.
In my last job I travelled around the UK a lot and was only allowed to use Premier Inn (we had a corporate account) for my hotels.
I don’t think my VPN ever worked on their WiFi and I had to use my mobile hotspot to do any meaningful work.
Yeup, any accommodation that has issues with their Internet, general advice is test somewhere else until there is a suitable solution.
One person at one client loves to keep staying in a place in a city with crappy hotel Internet and rubbish mobile coverage.
“Every time I come here I have issues…”
“uh-huh”…
Did they give you a reason why they block it?
Some companies opt to run their VPN service on port 443 because of this. Good example is Microsofts SSTP
Whenever I travel, I assume that Wi-Fi in accommodation will not work or will block something.
I use my phone as a hotspot.
If I travel internationally always carry a spare mobile and use a local SIM.
Erm, not a sysadmin but have spent plenty of time at premier inns.
How do you guys manage to do anything on premier inn WiFi, either the ultimate or free. They’re both so slow and flakey it’s unbelievable. They’d be better just not offering it. 8meg ultimate and 256k free download speeds, come on Whitbread.
Now HI Express is free WiFi that is usable, mostly
This is like announcing very loud they intend to spy on your traffic.
They make money on selling your information.
Even corporate VPNs? I can somewhat understand the logic for public providers, but corporate VPNs being blocked is not for any good reason I can think of.
I stopped at a premier Inn a couple weeks ago and GlobalProtect worked fine.
Do they explicitly block VPNs in particular or just everything with the exception of 80, 443, NTP and maybe DNS?
You might want to test and configure your VPN solution towards 443 if possible.
As someone that did MSP work for a few hotels I can assure you that their wifi isn’t that great in the first place and as a sysadmin I have found it to just generally be a better experience using a hotspot most of the time. Most places people are traveling to for work have cell coverage… not really in rural Alaska but you know, there’s other things that are great about that situation.
That’s crazy, I manage IT for a group of hotels… The only things we block are Bit Torrent traffic and known malicious sites… Other than that every room gets it’s own VLAN and if you need a VPN you can use one, we would lose a ton of business if we prevented VPN access.
Hey, did you test any specific type of VPN? As some of other responders wrote, we tend to use ports like 443, 53 (udp/tcp) to work around these issues. Maybe some sort of obfuscation.
Your company just needs to setup their vpn to run on a standard port such as 443. Do that and they can’t block shit.
Never heard of Premier Inn, but now I know to never use them.
Last year they were blocking on the free WiFi and I had to pay for the premium service.
If blocked on all WiFi, it is a shame as I like the actual hotels as I find them good value for money.
That is stupid on their part as most business guests would have to use a VPN.
Several hotels overseas (Germany was one of them) I have noted them doing deep packet SSL inspection at the Hotel. Our CEO was there trying to use a SSL-VPN to connect in and wouldn’t connect. I checked, cert mismatch so it rightfully refused to connect. Said no way in hell, got him off their WiFi and promptly revoked all his signed in sessions, and reset his password and had them tether for internet access. Because it was the CEO that chain (forgot what it was) is now on our shitlist and got there quick.