The VPN will not work in a hotel or at the office: what to do
Everything works at home, and then in a hotel or an office the VPN will not connect. The cause is almost always that the network filters traffic — but it filters in different ways, and the fix depends on which.
Why these networks specifically
A home provider generally passes anything not forbidden by law. A corporate network works the other way round: what the administrator explicitly opened is allowed and nothing else. Hotel Wi-Fi sits closer to the corporate model — the owner wants no trouble and closes everything surplus. In both cases the filter is not aimed at VPNs in particular; the rule is simply "leave the web working". The side effect is that a VPN stops working alongside games, video calls and anything else that does not look like a browser.
The usual cause: UDP is blocked
Protocols like Hysteria2 and WireGuard run over UDP. To a network administrator UDP is something that has to be allowed deliberately: browsing works without it, and it brings volume and trouble. So the filter often keeps only TCP on ports 80 and 443. The tell for this cause: the connection never establishes at all, the app keeps trying and gives up on a timeout. There is no authentication error, because the packets never reach the server.
The fix: switch to TCP
In a GnomeVPN subscription every country appears twice. The plain entry is Hysteria2 over UDP; the one marked TCP is VLESS + Reality. The second rides TCP on port 443 — the same channel as any HTTPS site. A network that lets a browser through lets it through too. Switching takes one tap in the app and nothing has to be reconfigured. If the TCP entry connects, UDP was the cause, and that is the entry to use on this network.
The second cause: a captive portal
Many public networks demand sign-in first: open a browser, accept the terms, sometimes enter a room number. Until that is done the network intercepts everything and lets nothing out. A VPN will not connect at that point even where the protocol is allowed. It is easy to check — open any site over plain HTTP. If you land on the hotel page, sign in there first and turn the VPN on afterwards. The order matters: some apps need restarting once the portal has let you through.
If none of that helped
Two possibilities remain. The first is to tether from a phone: mobile networks almost never filter UDP, and ordinary Hysteria2 works there. The second is that the network runs deep packet inspection and blocks on content rather than on ports. That is rare and mostly confined to large companies with a serious security team. Getting around it from the client side is close to impossible, and it is more honest to accept that a VPN will not work on that network.