For me, I can't remember the last time I used a hotel TV. When I travel, I want to do stuff at the place I'm visiting, the hotel room is just a place to sleep and shower.
If I do want to watch something, I much prefer the experience of my much nicer TV and surround sound system at home. That said, I don't watch much TV, so maybe this is easier for me.
If I have downtime when I travel, I tend to just read, or do the same thing I do at home - doomscrolling news, reddit, HN :)
> For me, I can't remember the last time I used a hotel TV. When I travel, I want to do stuff at the place I'm visiting, the hotel room is just a place to sleep and shower.
Again, really depends on what kind of travel you’re doing. What you’re describing sounds like leisure travel, which is awesome. But travel for work is often very different. You’re exhausted from a days work and you’re also often staying in very uninspiring places with little to explore.
I've certainly had work trips like this, and if bringing more devices helps you through it more power to you! This whole thread is kind of fascinating to see how people cope with having their normal day-to-day upended by travel.
For me, even in the boring towns, I've had good luck finding at least restaurants and breweries to explore. Sometimes I do end up falling back to reading books or playing old games on an emulator on my phone. For me, I'm willing to take the compromises of the phone-based entertainment for traveling lighter.
My "family" is multiple devices. M networks (hotel, airport, lounge) and N devices means O(M * N) wifi setups, so carrying a known 200g router means I only have to do O(M+N) setups.
But yeah I also have P family so O(M * P * N) would be a headache.
If your home WiFi uses PSK auth like 99.223% of all homes, you can get to 0 setups by using the same WiFi SSID+PSK on your travel router as the one on your home network.
I have a dedicated travel AppleTV for this. AppleTV is great at hotel captive portals (forwarding the web page to your phone). I am already logged into all my streaming apps, including my home DVR (ChannelsDVR).
I also think the variable state of hotel TVs is a factor even when travelling alone. Being able to plug your own device into the HDMI is valuable.