It’s not easy to find good, productive spaces when you travel. Cafe Wifi is a free iOS app that helps travelers discover the best cafés, co-working spaces, airport lounges, and hotels with Wi-Fi through user-generated content.
You can search for places by inputting the name of the city/place or zoom in on the map. Once you select a place you can find:
- Wi-Fi speeds and networks
- Seating configurations in various areas (+ power outlets/USB charging)
- Directions, pricing and opening hours
- User ratings and reviews
- Food/drink types and availability
- Print services (scanner, fax, printing, copying, etc.)
- Meeting space availability & pricing
- Access limitations (requires key/membership)
The app is also designed to function well in online and offline/low-connectivity situations, enabling you to pre-search for areas of interest or travel when Wi-Fi/cellular connectivity is available, and then revisit those results later when reaching a new location using just GPS.
Currently, Cafe Wifi is only available for iOS only but they have an Android waitlist and a website with all the same material.
Important: Harvard Business Review recommends these seven security tips to keep prying eyes away from your devices:
- Don’t use public Wi-Fi to shop online, log in to your financial institution, or access other sensitive sites—ever
- Use a Virtual Private Network, or VPN, to create a network-within-a-network, keeping everything you do encrypted
- Implement two-factor authentication when logging into sensitive sites, so even if malicious individuals have the passwords to your bank, social media, or email, they won’t be able to log in
- Only visit websites with HTTPS encryption when in public places, as opposed to lesser-protected HTTP addresses
- Turn off the automatic Wi-Fi connectivity feature on your phone, so it won’t automatically seek out hotspots
- Monitor your Bluetooth connection when in public places to ensure others are not intercepting your transfer of data
- Buy an unlimited data plan for your device and stop using public Wi-Fi altogether
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I was at LAX and NOT using their Wi-Fi but my own plan and logged into my American Express account for 2 minutes and they still picked it off. Thankfully I have fraud alert on my account and they were able to alert me. However, I was getting on a plane for a trip and I didn’t want them to shut the card down as I needed it for my car rental, etc. So for the next 5 days I got bombarded with emails asking to contact American Express and shut my account down even though I had called and discussed it. I did cancel it when I got home and therefore had to change all the websites and bills that I used the credit card for. Huge inconvenience! So my takeaway was don’t access any of your sensitive accounts like that in public spaces, ever.
-Sherrie