First impressions of the Unifi Travel Router

Mere hours before our most recent trip, my new Unifi Travel Router arrived.

Neither myself nor my broader household travel all that regularly, but when we do we’re likely to have some combination of multiple phones, multiple iPads, maybe a laptop and maybe a Steam Deck. Hooking up all of these things to the local wifi isn’t an insurmountable burden, but why do it yourself when you could spend a lot of money and have technology do it for you?

I have a Unifi setup at home with a Unifi Dream Machine Pro running the show, so a Unifi Travel Router seemed like a good solution to this most first world of problems.

The Unifi Travel Router is tiny. Comparable to a deck of cards, but thinner. It’s too thin for a normal RJ45 ethernet socket, although it has two of them on one end with a little hinged flap to expand to fit an ethernet plug.

I’m not sure what the recommended order of operation is, but when it arrived I fired it up and eventually it showed up in the Unifi app and I adopted it to the home network. I actually added it to the wrong WiFi network at first (I have an IOT vlan that has its own SSID), so that required a bit of stuffing around but eventually I got it sorted out.

It’s not really the sort of thing you can tests properly at home, so when we arrived at our destination I again powered it up. Once powered it starts operating as a WiFi access point that advertises itself as your home WiFi network, using the credentials you use to connect to your home network. So, all going well, your devices should just automatically connect to it.¹

The place we were staying had WiFi with a captive portal that required a login. To navigate this I went into the Unifi app on my phone. What I would have expected was that the Travel Router would have shown up as a Unifi device, along with all the other WAPs and routers and so on, but in the app it actually shows up as a “Site”, alongside the Dream Machine Pro.

Once you select it from the Site Manager it presents the WiFi networks it can connect to and when you try and connect it pops up the captured portal login page on your phone. That worked fine, and every other time the Travel Router booted up it connected without issue or intervention to that network. All of the devices on the Travel Router’s WiFi network then just accessed the hotel’s internet via the Travel Router. It all worked exceptionally smoothly.

The one catch was that the Travel Router is powered by USB-C and I had connected it to one of the multi-port USB power adapters I have in my travel kit. These multi-port power adapters, however, will renegotiate the power requirements of each of its ports when you add or remove any additional devices to it. When this happens, the Travel Router reboots.

This was unexpected, but in hindsight makes sense (everything else we plug into the power adapter has a battery and doesn’t care if it is momentarily unpowered). It’s also a pain because it means I have to add yet another power adapter to my kit just for the travel router. Maybe multi-port USB power adapters do exist that don’t have this problem, but I tried several different brands I have at home and they all did it.

One thing I wasn’t able to really test was that by default, once the Travel Router is on the Internet, it will use “Teleport” (which I believe is just a Unifi-branded Wireguard connection) to connect to your home controller. This appeared to work inasmuch as one of the devices attached to the Travel Router could ping one of the machines at home as machine.local, but I didn’t have anything on me on this trip which could test if all of the traffic was being routed back to my home machine and out onto the broader Internet through that. Even in the absence of that I can see the utility of being able to easily access machines on the home network, but in practice on my network everything I’m likely to want to access remotely is on a common Tailscale network anyway.

Other than the USB power thing, the main catch is that Unifi Travel Routers are hard to get hold of at the moment. While they’re, in theory, cheap, no where in Australia had local stock. I bought mine from a US seller on Amazon and I have not had the courage to look up how much it ended up costing me after currency conversions and delivery fees. It’s good that they’re not unavailable at any price, but if you want one badly enough you’re going to have to pay quite a bit right at the moment.

Overall, this seemed like a useful addition to our travel kit. It worked pretty much like you’d expect it to, and didn’t give us any trouble. It has only been one trip, and one connection, however, so we’ll see how well that holds up. It imagine it goes without saying, but the Unifi Travel Router is not going to be useful to you at all if you’re not already in the Unifi ecosystem, but if you are and you travel with a couple of devices, it’s worth checking out if you can get it at anywhere near its RRP.