Roaming Client and Airline/Hotel WiFi Best Practices

Overview

In typical use cases and circumstances, there is no action required to connect in flight with the Umbrella Roaming Client installed.

However, if any issues are observed or to ensure no issues are encountered when using the airlines listed in this article, please continue to read below.

Explanation and Fix

Typically in the event of encountering a captive portal, the Roaming Client will automatically back off into an "open" state behind a limited access captive portal to allow logging into the captive portal. This includes airline and hotel WiFi. You can see if the Roaming Client has backed off by checking the local UI for the client. 

In the event of an airline or hotel WiFi network where DNS is permitted, the Roaming Client may not disable behind the captive portal. On Windows, if the DNS search suffix is the WiFi captive portal, this will automatically add the suffix to the internal domains list to resolve connectivity to the captive portal. In some scenarios, the captive portal address may not be in the DNS suffix list, and DNS is not natively blocked, and the domain of the captive portal must be added into the Internal Domains list for the Roaming Client.

To be 100% prepared, add known airline and hotel captive portals to your Internal Domains list on the Umbrella Dashboard and do so in advance (where possible) of your users getting on an airplane or visiting a hotel with the Roaming Client on their laptop.

In the case of utilizing the AnyConnect Umbrella Roaming Security Module with the SWG Agent, you will want to add airline and hotel domains to your External Domains and IPs list if you notice that the captive portal is interfering with normal SWG traffic.

For reference, we have compiled a list of domains used for airline and hotel WiFi to add to your Internal Domains list. This list is not exhaustive and may omit some WiFi domains. 

• unitedwifi.com (United Airlines)
• gogoinflight.com (Multiple Airlines including Delta, Alaska, Virgin America *excluding ViaSat flights, American)
• southwestwifi.com (Southwest Airlines)
• flyfi.com (JetBlue Airlines)
• amtrakconnect.com (Amtrak)
• marriott.com (Marriott Hotels)
• hotelwifi.com (Stewart Hotel)

Are we missing an inflight or hotel WiFi captive portal domain? Let us know by shooting us an email at umbrella-support@cisco.com and reference this article.