Good question about the VPN option.

I used to work for a company that makes corporate VPNs, so I'm intimately familiar with them. It's true that a VPN would likely have solved the problem as well. I should have at least tried it for another diagnostic data point.

It was mostly the principle of the thing, I felt like the hotel network should have worked. (Maybe I'll report this as a bug to them or something: The DNS server on their gateway needs to be reset, it seems.)

Other reasons that I didn't want to try a VPN:

I had my company's corporate VPN ready to go, and I figure it would have worked, but it would only have functioned on my company PC, not the other devices.

I don't trust those "personal use" VPNs for the reasons Mark cited, and also because they have very deceptive advertising practices, trying to convince home users that they need a VPN for security (they don't).

I have occasionally considered activating the VPN hosting software on my Synology NAS and using that; it would occasionally be useful for dialing into my home network to get stuff done there. But with the pandemic I'm hardly ever away from home (today was an exception) and so it's not set up.
_________________________
Tony Fabris