These days, would you use any public WiFi? Even on extended travel, I carry a portable router that plugs into the hotel/stay router/port and then use my own Wi-Fi. Yes, I do have VPN/DNS filter/protection etc on the Phone but you have "too many devices" that will pick that up and every one of them will try to connect to that WiFi. Easier to take care of a Laptop but it becomes a hassle/irritant.

For India, Internet over the phone is so cheap (and OK quality) that most people don't care about WiFi outside of their home/office.

Would love to know more how you deal with these situations?

I do something similar, with a router flashed with openwrt. If there's a physical router/ethernet port I can plug into great, if not I run one of the radios in client mode to connect to the wifi.

All traffic is secured with wireguard to my home router, and then goes through my ISP. The wireguard tunnel is wrapped in an error correcting tunnel; it makes a huge difference on the usability a lot of public APs.

Can you share more details on the setup of the error correcting tunnel? That sounds very interesting!

Pretty sure I used the suggested config and it's been working flawlessly in the background.

Or something like that. With wireguard, it's just a matter of pointing the config at the local socket for the fec tunnel (or any other type of tunnel, there was a dicussion about making it look like TCP http traffic the other day), so it's pretty much plug and play.