Unable to connect to wifi in some hotels (self-assigned IP address)

My experience has been the opposite. Safari somehow does not stimulate a hotel WiFi login screen to appear. I start up chrome or Firefox and immediately get the login screen. I then return to Safari and do my business.

I view this as possibly a security feature of Safari that has unintended consequences.

It's DEFINITELY a MacBook Pro wireless issue. I have to travel with a Mac and a PC, and the only times I have WiFi connectivity issues are when using the Mac. And I also have often been able to work around the issue by switching to Chrome, which seems to see the WiFi home pages that Safari won't recognize....then getting online and switching back to Safari. This happens most frequently at hotels, at Starbucks and on planes when held hostage to the horrifically slow and expensive Gogo. But even trying Chrome won't work all the time, so I'm forced to get online with my iPhone first and use the personal hotspot for my computer (only b/c I have an unlimited data plan).

This cannot be a hotel issue. I have been having this issue for a long time in many hotels. today I brought both a mac and a windows computer. the windows computer has no issues. only the apple devices are having problems.

In some hotels I've stayed at you had to use their software to connect to the internet. Check with the front desk and see if there's anything you need to do to connect.

Have you tried the network diagnostics and assistant?

Those normally help a lot.

There is no solution. This is just old/flaky hotel networks. There will always be a support number. Call it. The last time this happened to me, they actually had a technician on site. He finally had to reboot the entire hotel network. That fixed it.

It is always with the hotel. If you don't believe me, get an ethernet cable and hook that up. Hotel networks are not cut and dry working or not working. I'm surprised your iPhone connected. Perhaps it connected earlier. Then the 4 kids on your floor fired up their P2P software. Nobody new will connect to the network until they leave.

That's not really a solution. You've just hacked your TCP/IP settings to bypass the hotel's DHCP server that has crashed or been overwhelmed.

Hotels are notoriously unreliable for internet. They don't have any better connection that you do at home on your cable modem or DSL - they just share it with a few hundred more people. Just checking e-mail can be a challenge.

If you are traveling and need reliable connectivity, get yourself a 3G device. You can get devices that can share the signal over wifi with a number of your own devices.

nbevan wrote:

As I have said before, I am not the only one who has been consistently unable to connect a Mac to some wifi networks when other devices are able consistently able to connect.

I don't dispute that. I'm just saying there is no "magic bullet" to get it to work. I have hacked up my DHCP too a couple of times. There is virtually an infinite number of routers in the world, all with levels of system health. There is no way you will be able to connect to all of them. There are a number that use hardware and software combinations that are particularly unfriendly to Macs.

If it doesn't work, try ethernet. If that doesn't work, try to get the router rebooted. If that doesn't work, and you don't have your own 3G device, you just have to go elsewhere. If you can't get it to connect in a minute or two, you won't ever get it connected so don't waste your time.