With all my recent travel, I’ve been needing to catch up on work (and blogging) on flights.  This means I need to use wifi. I often forget to pre-pay for a gogo in-flight pass, which is already fairly expensive at $20 for an all day pass.  Once you are on the plane the price goes up even more. I don’t know about you, but I think paying $20-$30 for a few hours of wifi is a complete rip-off.  Enter the travel hack.

I stumbled across this when frustrated that I would have to pay $10 for just a few minutes of wifi to check my email.  I had noticed that I could still do Google searches but just couldn’t access actual websites.  I started searching for hacks for free wifi, and hoped to catch something in the meta description viewable on the google search page. This led me to a YouTube video about how to get free wifi, but I couldn’t view  the video.  Thankfully someone explained in the comments (for some reason I could view YouTube pages).

Here’s what you do – and it should work on Alaska, American and Delta (not sure about United):

• Get on the Gogo in-flight wifi network
• Open your browser
• When the Gogo entertainment page pops up – look for where they list movies you can watch for free inflight.  Click on a free movie.
• You will then go to a page saying you need the Gogo in-flight app in order to watch the movie.  Click on the option to download it from the app store (even if you already have it)
• Fill out the captcha form which will then allow you to move on to the app store
• Don’t bother with downloading the app, instead immediately return to your browser (or texting or mail apps) because you now have about 10-15 minutes of free wifi!
• Once your wifi time runs out, repeat the steps above.  I found I could do this about 8-10 times before they said my limit was up.  Then I switched to another device.

The reason why this works is that in order for you to be able to watch the free movie, they have to allow you to download the Gogo app (many people don’t realize before they get on the plane that they will need it).  So a temporary portal to wifi internet is opened, giving you enough time to download and set up the app.  So simple.  Of course this is a hack, so try it at your own risk – and who knows how long it will last.

Happy internet browsing!