I think the conference hotel wi-fi is blocking competitors' websites?

I’m currently at the 2024 conference for the Society of the Scientific Study of Religion, where the Mormon Social Science Association always organizes a number of panels. (I presented on a reactionary Mormon Twitter hashtag earlier today!). MSSA traditionally has a Saturday evening no-host dinner, and as long as I’ve attended (okay, only since 2021), we’ve relied on a foodie board member to find a place for us to eat. Rick isn’t here this year, and somehow that got turned into my becoming responsible for finding us a restaurant to meet, eat, and chat at.

Thankfully, some other folks were helpful in providing suggestions where we might be able to sit 20 or so people, which made my job a lot easier. The one that immediately stood out (and that I’m going to run past some board members as my top recommendation) was the Novo Asian Food Hall, which just looks amazing. At least, it did on its Yelp page and on the Internet Archive capture of its web page, because I could not seem to bring up the food hall’s current site on my laptop. That did make me feel a little bit hesitant—could I trust a restaurant that didn’t have a working website, no matter how good it looks?

I decided that I could, but that I probably ought to have some backup options as well, and started scanning through the list of recommendations someone else had forwarded to me. I saw another food hall-style restaurant on there, and since that just makes things way easier in terms of 1) not needing to arrange for a huge reservation and 2) potentially accommodating different tastes in food all under one roof, I decided that I would look that up as well. Here’s the bonkers thing, though: That website wasn’t working either.

This raised my suspicions some, and I did what I should have done when I first hopped onto hotel wi-fi and switched on my VPN (years ago, I got a good deal on a lifetime plan with Windscribe, and that seems to be working okay for me). Like magic, the websites for both food halls loaded in an instant. It’s not that either business needed to fire its web staff—it sure seems like The Westin Pittsburgh doesn’t want people staying here to know about some of the cool food options in the area?

I’d need to do some more digging around to really figure out what’s going on here. I can access other restaurants just fine on the hotel wi-fi, which complicates my assumptions some, and I suppose it’s possible that there’s something else going on here instead of Marriott being super creepy and manipulative. Even with those caveats, though, it sure seems like my hotel is rewarding my stay by trying to influence which restaurants I can look into to eat, and that sucks.

• macro
• Work
• SSSR 2024
• Mormon Social Science Association
• SSSR
• Marriott
• Internet Archive
• VPN
• Windscribe