Recommended for international travel in Switzerland: "Traverlers Wifi"

(Note: I have no affiliation with "Travelers Wifi," nor is this a paid post. I'm just a fan!)

My family and I were fortunate enough to be able to spent the past sixteen days traveling abroad in Switzerland. To cover us while there, our current cell provider, AT&T, wanted US $10 per person per day. For just one person, that of course would work out to $160; for the four of us with cell phones, we'd have gotten hit for $640. Eek!

My wife Melissa, an excellent hobbyist travel planner, researched, and landed on Travelers Wifi as the solution. It's a cell-phone-sized device that provides cellular connectivity in Switzerland (specifically that one country), and allows up to 5 client devices at a time to connect via Wi-Fi to access the Internet.

The device cost €5.90 (a little over US $6) per day. Quite the cost savings over the up-to-$40-daily that we would have been spending!

Bottom line: It worked great! 

The device connected with no issues and had good Internet speeds everywhere we went (Zurich, Lucerne, Lauterbrunnen and the Berner Oberland region, Vevey and environs, and Geneva). 

Our device was good for about eight hours of battery life on a full (overnight) charge. That's not quite a full day of adventures, but it was not to worry: We had come prepared with a few external battery packs with USB-A outputs; connecting one of those to the Travelers Wifi device was more than enough to get it through an entire day. I'd recommend being similarly prepared to back up the Travelers Wifi device with an external battery.

Pick-up of the device in Zurich was trivial; Travelers Wifi has a dedicated storefront in the Zurich airport in the public (outside of security) area, and they were able to look up our online reservation (made in advance, prior to our trip) and hand over the device with no issues.

Return of the device was similarly easy; although the Geneva airport (from which we were departing) has no Travelers Wifi storefront, it does have several of the yellow "Die Post" mailboxes. The Travelers Wifi comes with a "self-addressed stamped envelope"; we just put the device and it's included cable and wall charger into that envelope, and dropped the resultant thin package into a mailbox at the airport.

I'm happy to be able to cheerfully recommend Travelers Wifi to anyone traveling abroad in Switzerland!

Hotels! Let me play stuff on my room's TV screen!

It has been my observation that successful hotel chains seem to always be on the lookout for new ways to positively differentiate themselves from their competition -- and thus, to attract more guests, and/or be able to charge higher rates. Such differentiating amenities range from the lavish -- such as building elaborate "pool complexes" on the hotel property -- to the simple -- a classic example being offering a warm cookie at check-in.

In this spirit: Hey, hotel chains! Here's a simple "amenity" suggestion that would get me to book with you over your competition, all else (e.g. location and price) being approximately equal: You know those nice big flat-screen TVs you've put in each of your guest rooms? It would be super great if you'd let me use that nice screen with my gaming console to play a game, or with my laptop to watch a video -- instead of, say, actively blocking my ability to do so!

Pictured: Not necessarily the optimal guest experience.

I was recently fortunate enough to be able to spend a couple of weeks traveling around Utah with my family, hiking in the national parks. Beautiful, and highly recommended! (Although if the forecast calls for 110°F+ temperatures, I recommend heading out as early in the morning as you can manage!)

Unfortunately, we had a lot better luck with the natural scenery than we did getting streaming video to work in our various hotel rooms' TVs.  I had come on the trip prepared -- or so I thought -- with a laptop and an HDMI cable, so we would be able to stream a show in the evenings after our daily adventures (or in the hot afternoons between them!).

In the trip's best-case hotel, we had a TV where I was able to reach around to the back of the TV to get at an HDMI port, then access a hidden function of the remote to change the input source on the TV, managing to get the show being streamed via my laptop to play on the TV.

In the worst-case hotels -- plural -- the TV's onboard HDMI ports had evidently been disabled entirely. Even though (peering behind the wall-mounted TVs) there were HDMI ports present on the TVs, there was no way to switch to them. The TVs were "hotel models" whose only physical control was an on/off button, and there was also no way to switch via the TV's remote controls.

This resulted in some silly situations like the one pictured above, with the family sitting around the hotel room's TV to watch some LEGO Masters -- with the TV uselessly powered off, while we huddled around the show on my laptop's small screen. 

While certainly a trivial problem in the grand scheme of things, it would nevertheless be quite a nice amenity to stay in a hotel which made it easy, instead of difficult or impossible, to play content on the room's TV screen from my laptop or gaming console, via an HDMI connection!  (And I have to imagine that this would be cheaper and easier for hotels to implement than adding more "pool complexes" to their properties!)