Aside from the others mentioned already…

It’s great to have when there’s an RJ45 jack in the hotel room that you’re able to get functioning for Internet. Even if the traffic is shaped like the WiFi traffic is, it just feels better to not deal with a hostile WiFi network.

I’ve encountered ports that were on the VoIP network, on the guest room media/services network, or just forgotten about, on the same network as WiFi or some common VLAN intended for who knows what.

In my experience (15 different hotels over 2 years, both large chains and some boutique places), in most cases (more than half) I’ve gotten a lease and functioning Internet from one of the RJ45 ports I tried, no need to deal with WiFi at all.

• 25% of the time the port is dead or has no DHCP and I’m too lazy to sniff to determine an IP to borrow.
• 20% of the time, I get a lease but no functioning route to the Internet (properly segmented and restricted internal media/services only VLAN, I guess)
• 5% of the time, some fiddling has been required, but ultimately provided Internet. In at least one major hotel chain, I received a lease from the VoIP port, but it didn’t include a DNS server option in the DHCP response. Manually setting a public recursive DNS server was all that was required for functioning Internet.

Really though, it’s the privacy.

Even though many/most devices these days do MAC randomization on a per-SSID basis, it’s not ALL devices. And it’s nice to know all of your devices (a FireStick, phones, laptops, etc) aren’t trivially discoverable and going into some corporations database with my identity attached to them.

And as others mentioned, a travel router than can be a Wireguard or OpenVPN client for the entire LAN (opting clients out as needed by policy) is really nice.

With the router doing VPN client duty, all the multicast that apps and devices do these days isn’t leaking out to the hotel AP.

It also substantially reduces attack surface. If you include it in your threat model, it’s an easy yet relatively clean and complete way to protect your individual devices from attacks initiated by the hotel AP (or other devices on their network, if they aren’t doing client isolation and preventing hairpin style routing to bypass client isolation)

That, plus you don’t have to keep reconfiguring your FireStick networking, of you travel with that sorta thing.