In the past I've had no problem turning a hotel's wired high-speed Internet access into WiFi simply by plugging in my Airport Express and going through the sign-up process.

The Le Meridien Budapest where I'm staying has free wired HSIA. What makes this different from my past experiences is that there's absolutely no sign up necessary. I just connect an Ethernet cable between their HSIA outlet and my MacBook and away I go. May or may not be relevant but WiFi is for-a-fee. I'm not sure this is related to why I'm not able to use Airport Express to establish WiFi in my room even though I choose my Airport Express's SSID and signal is very strong. I've run Airport diagnostics and bottom line is that it's saying Airport is OK but that the Internet connection is not live (or something to that effect).FWIW, the Network TCP/IP configuration I've set is "Automatic using DHCP."

Any Mac experts out there who may have a clue as to what's going on?