A baby monitor for travel and hotel rooms
Hotel networks are built to keep guests' devices apart, which is precisely what a baby monitor needs them not to do. The way around it is to not use the network at all.
Why hotel and rental Wi-Fi breaks monitors
Guest networks almost always run client isolation: every device gets internet, and none of them can see each other. That is good security and it is fatal for anything that pairs two devices on the same network. Add captive portals that need a room number, per-device login limits, and a signal that dies two doors down the corridor, and a Wi-Fi-only monitor is a coin flip in a hotel.
Dedicated radio monitors dodge that entirely — which is why they travel well — at the price of another box, another charger and another thing to forget in the room.
What to use instead
Slumbi's Bluetooth link needs no network whatsoever: the two phones talk to each other directly. No portal, no room-number login, nothing to set up on arrival, and it is unaffected by client isolation because it never touches the Wi-Fi. For a hotel room, an adjoining room, or a holiday rental where you are on the terrace and the baby is inside, that is usually the whole answer.
The trade is range — roughly a floor of a normal building. Down the corridor to the ice machine, no. Sitting on the balcony while they nap, yes.
If the rental's Wi-Fi is a normal home router — most Airbnb-style places are — then it behaves like your own network and you get the full-quality link. It is specifically hotel and public guest networks that isolate clients.
Setting up in an unfamiliar room
- Bring a charger and, if you can, a short extension. The socket is never where the shelf is.
- Put the nursery phone somewhere solid with the travel cot in frame — a chest of drawers or a windowsill, cable led away from the cot.
- Baby Unit on that phone, Parent Unit on yours, and check the picture before bedtime rather than after. Two minutes in daylight saves a scramble in the dark.
- Turn the nursery phone's own volume down. In a room this small a lullaby at home volume is much too loud.
Two things travel changes
Time zones and dark rooms. The night light is more useful away from home than in it — an unfamiliar room has no landmarks at 03:00. It dims from the parent phone, so you can find the cot without turning on a ceiling light that wakes everybody.
Battery. Airports and cars mean both phones start the evening with less than they would at home. The nursery phone should be on the charger regardless; Slumbi warns you when its battery gets low and offers a one-tap drop to audio-only to stretch what is left.
Grandparents and the spare room
The other travel case is leaving your child somewhere. Both phones have to be signed in to the same account for the pairing to exist, so the usual approach is to take your own two phones with you rather than installing anything on a relative's device — and to take them home again when you leave, which is also the right answer for a camera in someone else's house.