Your own phone's hotspot is the more secure choice. Hotel Wi-Fi is usually faster and cheaper per gigabyte. The right pick depends on what you're doing.
A personal hotspot puts you on a private, password-protected network that only your devices share, with traffic going straight to your carrier. Hotel Wi-Fi puts you on a network with every other guest, run by equipment you know nothing about. The NSA's public Wi-Fi guidance tells its own staff to use a hotspot with strong authentication instead of public Wi-Fi whenever they can.
When the hotspot wins
- Banking, tax, medical portals, or work systems
- Any time the hotel network looks sketchy or asks for odd sign-in details
- Short sessions where data use is small
When hotel Wi-Fi makes sense
- Streaming, video calls, and big downloads that would burn through a travel eSIM or roaming plan
- Long work days on a laptop
- Places where your cellular signal is weak indoors
Keep your hotspot tight: set a strong password and leave Maximize Compatibility off unless an old device needs it, since Apple notes that setting can reduce security. Cost matters too. International roaming or a small eSIM plan can run out fast if you tether a laptop.
The practical middle ground is hotel Wi-Fi with a VPN such as NordVPN running. That gets you the hotel's bandwidth while encrypting your traffic so the hotel network sees only a connection to the VPN server, not the domains you visit. Save the hotspot for the sensitive stuff, or for when the hotel connection fails the basic checks.