No hotel wifi? No problem, here’s a solution
Anyone who’s tried to take teenager children to stay in a hotel without wifi will know that it’s not worth the agro. My kids would rather I removed their oxygen supply than wrench them away from Facebook, Snapchat and Whatsapp. Plus, as far as some kids are concerned, if they can’t ‘insta" every moment of their holiday, they might as well stay at home.
So what do you do if your chosen destination has no wifi but you don’t want ear-ache from the youngsters in the family? You can pay for them to roam on their home network, but this could cost a small fortune, especially if they accidentally or deliberately go over their data allowance. We’ve all read the horror stories of parents who are landed with a huge phone bill when they return from holiday to find their child has been music streaming or downloading movies to their mobile in South Africa.
A more cost-effective and safer solution is to hire a mifi with a data SIM for your destination. If you haven’t got a clue what I’m taking about, a mifi is effectively a mini portable router which you carry with you to provide a personal wifi hotspot. You can use it to connect multiple devices, including phones, laptops and tablets, to the internet.
UK-based Cellhire offers mifis for hire for use within Europe and elsewhere, with prices starting from £39.99 for 30-days use within the EU and 1GB of pre-paid data. If you need more data, you can get 10GBs for £89.99.
When I booked a family cycling holiday to Croatia, I was concerned my children would complain if they couldn’t get wifi everywhere we went, so I signed up to the Cellhire 10GB mifi package. The mifi came with the SIM installed, so all we had to do was turn it on when we arrived. This meant that every time we stopped for lunch, or even just a drink, we could check our emails and the kids could update their FB status, chat with their mates or whatever else they needed to do online, without having to pay to roam.
We also used the mifi in the evenings at hotels where there was no free wifi in the rooms. Even so, we had enough data left over at the end of a week for our second week’s holiday in Italy, where the wifi from the villa didn’t extend to the pool area so the kids took the mifi outside with them.
Personally I’d love a totally screen-free holiday, in theory, but I know from bitter experience that in practice that just makes the kids restless/grumpy, so at least a mifi keeps them connected without the risk of them running up a huge mobile bill.
Linsey McNeill
Editor Linsey McNeill has been writing about travel for more than three decades. Bylines include The Times, Telegraph, Observer, Guardian and Which? plus the South China Morning Post. She also shares insider tips on thetraveljournalist.co.uk
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