When many of us travel, we have to stay productive while away from home. Oftentimes, our travel is work-related in the first place. When you get to your hotel only to find that it's WiFi is unusably slow, it can be incredibly frustrating.

What if you could know ahead of time? Well, the aptly-named website Hotel WiFi Test tells you that information. You can browse by city and list hotels by their speed or nightly rates, with the ability to filter out the hotels with slow speeds entirely.

The information is largely crowd-sourced, with people running speed tests through the site while at the hotel in question. The IP address is used to help verify that the speed test isn't either the hotel trying to artificially boost its speed or a competitor trying to make another hotel seem slow.

Another important tidbit of information offered is whether or not the hotel's WiFi is free. You'd be surprised at which hotels make you pay for WiFi connections; I once stayed at a Hyatt Regency, making me assume the arm and leg I paid for the room would be sufficient to use the Internet. Wrong! I had to pay $10/day or $25 for my entire stay to use their WiFi.

Now you can check ahead of time. For when they don't have precise information, Hotel WiFi Test has recently added a machine-learning algorithm to predict the speeds of untested hotels. It uses parameters like the hotel chain's reputation for WiFi speed (determined by tests in other markets) and the average Internet speeds in the city being estimated.

This is a great tool to help you choose in smaller markets where results aren't available. Perhaps ironically, by becoming useful even when tests aren't available, more people will probably head to Hotel WiFi Test to do a speed test on their hotel WiFi.