Why Your VPN Location Changes When Travel Wi-Fi Switches to an eSIM

The client portal showed New York when I opened it on the hotel Wi-Fi. Ten minutes later, outside the lobby, it showed Toronto. After I reconnected the VPN, it placed me in Chicago.

I had not crossed a street.

I was trying to upload a revised presentation before leaving for the airport. The progress bar was almost complete when my phone lost the hotel’s weakening Wi-Fi and switched to a travel eSIM. The upload stopped. The portal signed me out and warned that my session had changed location.

I blamed the eSIM first. I turned mobile data off, waited, turned it on again, and reopened the VPN. That produced the third city—and another login code.

The VPN was supposed to keep my online location consistent. Instead, the moment my phone changed networks, everything appeared to move.

My phone was reporting three different locations

The confusion made more sense once I stopped treating “location” as a single piece of information.

My physical location came from GPS, nearby Wi-Fi access points, cellular towers, and other signals available to the phone. My travel eSIM had its own public internet gateway, which might be in another city or even another country. The VPN added a third location: the exit server websites were meant to see.

Those locations do not have to match.

A maps app with location permission may continue showing the street where I am standing. An IP-checking page may show the city associated with the VPN server. If the VPN connection drops, another website may briefly see the public IP used by the hotel or eSIM instead. Google’s documentation confirms that services can combine IP-based estimates with device location and previous activity, so two apps on the same phone can reach different conclusions about where the user is. (Google)

Travel eSIMs make the mismatch more visible. Research into the Airalo ecosystem found that a traveler’s mobile traffic may leave the local cellular network through an internet gateway located elsewhere. (Arxiv) I could therefore be physically near the hotel, connected to a local mobile tower, and still appear online to be in another region before the VPN was even involved.

City-level IP databases add more uncertainty. MaxMind notes that mobile IP addresses often identify only a broad area rather than a dependable city. (Maxmind) “Toronto” on the portal did not necessarily mean my traffic had passed through downtown Toronto. It meant the address visible at that moment was associated with that location in the database the portal used.

That explained two of the cities. The third came from the VPN itself.

When the phone left Wi-Fi and moved onto cellular data, the original protected route stopped working. The VPN then reconnected automatically and selected another available exit. From the portal’s perspective, one session had arrived from New York, briefly appeared on the eSIM’s public route, and returned through Chicago.

The important problem was not that one city label was inaccurate. It was that the protected session had not survived the network change.

The larger VPN gave me more places to reconnect

I had chosen an established provider for sensible reasons. It had a long public history, a large support operation, and servers in far more places than I was likely to visit.

On stable hotel Wi-Fi, it worked as expected. I selected an automatic US connection, checked the displayed IP, and began the upload.

The weakness appeared during the handoff.

When the hotel signal disappeared, the VPN icon remained visible for a few moments, but the upload did not move. The app was still trying to use a route built on the previous network. Once it recovered on cellular data, automatic selection placed me on a different exit server.

Android’s VPN documentation shows why this transition requires active handling: a VPN application must keep track of the Wi-Fi or cellular network carrying its tunnel and update that relationship when the available network changes. (Google) A status icon can remain on-screen while the path beneath it is already unusable.

Public traveler discussions describe the same practical frustration in simpler terms: the phone says the VPN is connected after moving from Wi-Fi to mobile data, but pages stop resolving until the user disconnects and reconnects manually. (Reddit)

That was close enough to what I saw. The technical detail mattered only because it changed what I needed from the app.

I did not need another country flag. I needed the current session to survive the move from one network to another.

I could have searched the established provider’s server list for the original New York exit and restarted the upload. But that would only repair the failure after it happened. I was still heading toward airport Wi-Fi, a possible captive portal, and another switch back to cellular service near the gate.

The provider’s size was useful when choosing a destination. It was less useful when the network underneath the tunnel kept changing.

The handoff became the real test

I opened OnlydogVPN because its interface offered a situation-based option for unstable or changing networks instead of beginning with a map full of server locations.

During the test for this article, I connected on hotel Wi-Fi, reopened the client portal, and restarted the presentation upload. Then I walked beyond the access point’s range and let the phone move onto the travel eSIM.

The progress bar paused.

Then it continued.

The portal did not sign me out. It did not request another verification code. When I refreshed the IP check, it still showed the same VPN exit.

That was the result I had been looking for. The phone had changed networks, but the website had not seen a new online identity halfway through the upload.

The service uses an HTTP/3-based transport. HTTP/3 runs over QUIC, which was designed to preserve a connection when the device’s IP address or network path changes. (IETF) In practical terms, it gives the app a better foundation for moving an existing connection from Wi-Fi to cellular data instead of rebuilding everything as an unrelated session.

I could observe the handoff and the stable exit address, but not the service’s internal routing or filtering decisions. What mattered on the network in front of me was visible: the file kept moving, and the portal kept the session open.

The service’s additional traffic obfuscation was less important in this hotel test than its recovery behavior, but it made sense as part of the same travel design. Public Wi-Fi, mobile carriers, and restrictive networks do not all treat VPN traffic in the same way. A transport that resembles ordinary modern web traffic gives the connection more room to remain usable when the surrounding network changes.

Still, the immediate benefit was not theoretical. The upload reached 100 percent before I entered the taxi.

One less account while packing

With the presentation delivered, I opened my laptop to check the final slide. Its hotel session had expired, and I did not want to create or recover another account while packing chargers into my bag.

The smaller app let me share access through a verification code rather than another email-and-password login.

That feature had not influenced my first choice. It became useful only after the main problem was solved. The phone had completed the upload; now the laptop could connect without turning the last ten minutes before checkout into another registration process.

There is a real limitation. The service has fewer server locations and a shorter public track record than the established provider. Someone who must appear in a very specific country or city may prefer the larger network.

That was not my problem that morning.

My problem was a live work session crossing from hotel Wi-Fi to a travel eSIM without changing location, exposing the carrier route, or forcing me to begin again. The established provider offered more exits after the connection broke. The smaller app kept the useful exit through the handoff.

For a traveler carrying an unfinished upload out of a hotel lobby, recovery matters more than the number of cities waiting in the server menu.