Originally Posted by
PabloTbag
Ok, Thanks. I'm trying to understand how this works then. I guess the router passes the web-portal redirection over to the client that is attached. That seems a little funny since there may be multiple clients attached to the travel router and I'm not sure how it would know to pass the login page to, but maybe it is just the first one to access the router. It doesn't seem necessary to use the clone MAC address feature then either.
When the travel router is connected and gets an IP address from the DHCP server, the MAC for the travel router is added to a table on the hotel's router. Since your travel router is most likely doing NAT (Network Address Translation), any (and all) packets coming from the computers on the other side of the router will be "modified" to look like they are coming from the router itself, and by extension the MAC address of the router.
The behavior of going to a web portal and accepting the terms, logging in, etc. is called a Captive Portal, and this is generally a feature built-in to routers to get users to accept some conditions, etc. before allowing internet access. Once you accept, the router remembers that (typically for 24 hours in a hotel) so future HTTP requests from that same MAC won't be forced to go through the captive portal process again.
Long story short, the first person who tries to access the internet through your router will have to accept the conditions, etc. and then future connections will be let through automatically. You don't need to clone the MAC address since hotels won't have any knowledge of your MAC address ahead of time. That was a feature that used to be used by ISPs who knew the MAC address because they provided you the router for your house. These days, that isn't typically used by any ISPs any more.
Ryan