Airport and station WiFi login: how captive portals work

Join the WiFi at an airport or a station and you meet a page with a Connect button, a short form, or nothing at all because the phone joined by itself. The first two are a captive portal, the page a network shows before it lets a device online; the third is a way around one. Using the operators' own help pages, this guide explains how sign-in works at seven hubs and why it fails for travellers, then what the businesses inside a terminal can do with guest WiFi of their own.

Airports and large stations run WiFi across the whole building, sometimes through a specialist: Network Rail provides its station WiFi with its service provider telent. CaptiFi's fit is the cafes, bars, shops and lounges inside them, where the lease allows it, and smaller transport venues that run their own WiFi. The last two sections cover both.

How sign-in works at seven hubs

Sources for each row: Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Dublin Airport, MSP Airport, Network Rail and Transport for London, as published on 3 October 2026. Operators change these terms, so check the current page before you travel.

Click-through, a short form or automatic

Dublin needs only a tap on Connect, and MSP and Network Rail ask travellers to accept their terms first. The operator learns little about who joined. Network Rail's privacy notice says it collects a device's pseudo MAC address "to connect you to the Wi-Fi" and does "not collect any other personal data as part of this Wi-Fi service". It keeps that address for 90 days, so a returning traveller does not register again at any participating station within that period.

Gatwick and Heathrow ask for more. Gatwick's free tier needs a valid email address, and Heathrow asks travellers to register. Gatwick also offers its faster tier free to myGatwick members, whose members become "eligible for a host of great offers each time you travel through London Gatwick".

On the London Underground there is no page. TfL says devices with a SIM card "will automatically pick up the Wi-Fi signal" in WiFi-enabled stations, through the passenger's own mobile network. The guide to guest WiFi login options compares these methods, and the others venues use, side by side.

Time limits, speed tiers and paid passes

Stansted gives two hours free. MSP gives four-hour sessions with a timer showing the time left, and travellers can start another session "at no charge" as often as they like. Gatwick's free tier has no time limit but runs at up to 50 Mbps; 100 Mbps comes with a free myGatwick account or with Premium Wi-Fi, charged at £5 for 24 hours. Network Rail's WiFi terms keep the right to "impose usage or Service limits, suspend the Service, or block certain kinds of usage, to protect, and to be fair to, other users".

Free access is limited by time at Stansted and MSP and by speed at Gatwick, where members and paying users get more. A business inside a terminal has the same levers at a smaller scale: a session length set to how long customers stay, a per-guest speed limit, and paid passes for longer or faster access.

Passpoint and OpenRoaming

The Wi-Fi Alliance says Passpoint "streamlines Wi-Fi access, eliminating the need for users to find and authenticate to a network each time they visit", with automatic network discovery, roaming between hotspots and WPA3 security. OpenRoaming, run by the Wireless Broadband Alliance, is a federation built on Passpoint and other standards. Member networks authenticate devices through established identity providers "such as a service provider, device manufacturer, cloud ID or even loyalty memberships", so travellers roam between networks "without the use of splash pages or sign-in screens". The WBA says Samsung devices are already OpenRoaming enabled.

A phone without a matching profile cannot join that way, so a hub that adds Passpoint still needs a sign-in page for every traveller whose phone has none.

Why sign-in fails for travellers

Heathrow's WiFi troubleshooting sheet deals with corporate and business laptops, where proxy server settings can stop the landing page appearing. It tells travellers to untick the proxy setting, retype www.heathrow.com in the address bar so the browser is redirected to the landing page, and, if they connect through a VPN, to turn the proxy setting back on once they are online. TfL advises against connecting on a moving Tube train, because some devices extend the time they search for WiFi hotspots to save battery, and says it is better to connect after getting off.

Other causes are the same as at any venue with a sign-in page: an always-on VPN that tries to connect before the portal has let the device through, or a sign-in window the traveller dismissed. The guide to a captive portal that is not showing goes through each cause and the fix.

Filtering on transport WiFi

Heathrow says its WiFi "is certified by Friendly WiFi" and "uses filters to block unsuitable content". TfL says its station WiFi is certified too, and Manchester Airports Group announced Friendly WiFi certification across Manchester, London Stansted and East Midlands airports in 2019. Friendly WiFi says approved venues have committed to blocking "pornography, child sexual abuse material, and other illegal content identified by the Internet Watch Foundation and trusted security lists". Filtering runs on the network, through the firewall or a filtering service, and CaptiFi does not filter web content.

Guest WiFi for a cafe, bar or lounge in a terminal

Before buying an access point for a unit inside a terminal, read the lease and the airport's technology rules. The San Diego County Regional Airport Authority's concessions operating standards say a concessionaire "must use the exclusive airport-approved wireless provider for all public-facing Wi-Fi" and may not install its own wireless network without the Authority's written consent. Even access points for its own staff need approval, "to ensure there isn't signal clashing". The Authority's shared tenant service sells a dedicated Wi-Fi network name (SSID) localised to the tenant's space. Los Angeles World Airports' wireless specification says LAWA "will provide all Wi-Fi required by Tenant at the sole expense of the Tenant" and keeps "full control over broadcasting SSIDs and setting transmission frequencies and channels".

At airports like these, a concession's guest WiFi runs on a network the airport or its approved provider controls. A branded sign-in page is still possible if that network can send guests to an external captive portal and let them through afterwards. CaptiFi needs the hardware to support an external captive portal, a way to authorise guests (a controller API, RADIUS against CaptiFi's server, or a click-through grant like Cisco Meraki's) and a walled garden that lets guests reach CaptiFi before they sign in. Ask the airport's provider whether your network can do that. If it cannot, CaptiFi is not the right tool for that unit.

Where the rules allow it, a cafe, bar or lounge can set up its guest WiFi around its own customers:

• A session length set to how long customers stay, in minutes, hours or days, with a per-guest speed limit so one download does not slow the rest.
• WiFi vouchers, generated in batches of up to 100 and handed out at a lounge desk, each with its own duration.
• Paid WiFi passes from 30 minutes to seven days, paid into the business's own Stripe account.
• A sign-in page in English, French or Spanish, chosen from the phone's language setting.
• A redirect after sign-in to the menu or an order page.

Guests sign in with an email address or a phone number on your branded form, with marketing consent asked separately. Per-guest speed limits are enforced on UniFi, CaptiFi devices and RADIUS-based systems, and not yet on TP-Link Omada, Cisco Meraki or cloud-only UniFi.

Where CaptiFi fits

Smaller transport venues are the simpler case: regional airports, ferry and coach terminals, and station cafes that run their own network. There, CaptiFi is the sign-in page on the venue's own access points or on the CaptiFi plug-and-play device, and the hardware page lists the ten vendor ecosystems it works with. An operator with units across several terminals or stations can add every unit to one account and, on Pro, see combined figures for all of them.

Essentials covers the branded sign-in page, contact capture, email export, paid WiFi and vouchers, from $69/mo on the pricing page. Growth adds review requests, email marketing and SMS. You can try it on your own network with a 30-day free trial.

Sources, linked above and checked on 3 October 2026: the WiFi help pages of Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Dublin Airport and MSP Airport; Heathrow's WiFi troubleshooting sheet; Network Rail's WiFi privacy notice and terms; Transport for London's station WiFi page; Manchester Airports Group's press release of November 2019; the Wi-Fi Alliance's Passpoint page; the Wireless Broadband Alliance's OpenRoaming FAQ; Friendly WiFi; the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority's Concessions Operating Standards (August 2025); Los Angeles World Airports' Wireless Communication System specification (March 2018); CaptiFi's customer documentation, October 2026. Wi-Fi, Passpoint and WPA3 are trade marks of the Wi-Fi Alliance, and OpenRoaming is a trade mark of the Wireless Broadband Alliance. Heathrow, Gatwick, myGatwick, Stansted, Friendly WiFi, Meraki, UniFi, Omada, Stripe and other names are trade marks of their owners. CaptiFi is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.