Hotel Room Gaming: How to Get Your Steam Deck or Switch 2 on the TV

A compact travel dock puts your Steam Deck or Switch 2 on a hotel TV in a minute, when the TV cooperates. Here's the kit, and what to do when the hotel's HDMI is locked.

By Sam Okafor

Updated: 2026-05-21

A compact travel dock and a short HDMI cable will put your Steam Deck or Switch 2 on a hotel TV in about a minute. The kit is small and the steps are simple. The one variable that decides whether it works is the TV itself, because some hotel sets lock or hide their HDMI input, and that’s the part nobody warns you about.

So here’s what to pack, and what to do when the TV fights back.

What you actually need

You don’t need the full official dock. A charger-sized travel dock does the job and weighs almost nothing:

• A compact travel dock with HDMI out and USB-C power passthrough. The Genki Covert Dock 3 is the current pick: it’s the size of a wall charger, outputs to a TV over HDMI, and delivers 65W to charge the console at the same time. It works with both the Switch 2 and the Steam Deck, which is what you want if you travel with both. JSAUX and a few others make similar all-in-one travel docks. Look for a travel dock for Switch 2 / Steam Deck on Amazon.
• A short, flat HDMI cable. Flat cables tuck behind a wall-mounted TV far more easily than a stiff round one. Look for a flat HDMI cable on Amazon.
• The power you already carry. Most travel docks run off the console’s own USB-C charger, so there’s nothing extra to pack. The 65W+ GaN charger from your travel kit runs the dock and charges the console at the same time.

That’s the whole rig. It fits in a jacket pocket.

The setup, when the TV cooperates

1. Plug the travel dock into a wall socket.
2. Run the HDMI cable from the dock to a free HDMI port on the TV.
3. Connect the console to the dock over USB-C.
4. On the TV remote, press Source or Input and select the HDMI port you used.

On a Switch 2 that gives you docked play at up to 4K60 on the room’s TV; on a Steam Deck, the same, scaled to the screen. Controllers pair the way they do at home.

The hotel-TV wildcard

This is where hotel gaming gets its reputation. Hotel TVs are often commercial sets, not the model you’d buy for your living room, and they’re set up to keep guests on the hotel’s own channels. Three things go wrong:

• The input menu is locked. Some hotel TVs disable the Source/Input button entirely, so even with your HDMI plugged in, you can’t switch to it.
• The ports are hidden or full. Wall-mounted TVs often have their ports facing the wall, sometimes behind a fixed panel, and the accessible HDMI port may already be taken by the hotel’s media box.
• HDMI-CEC misbehaves. Occasionally the TV won’t auto-detect the source even when the port is free.

What to do, in order: press Source/Input first (it works more often than not). If that’s dead, feel behind the TV for a spare HDMI port. If the panel’s locked or there’s no free port, a quick call to reception sometimes gets it switched on, since plenty of guests ask. And if none of that works, you fall back to handheld play — which is no hardship on either device. The honest takeaway: bring the dock, expect it to work most of the time, and don’t be surprised by the occasional locked set.

Switch 2 and Steam Deck, briefly

Both dock the same way through a travel dock, with one difference worth knowing. The Switch 2 is built to dock and outputs cleanly to a TV at up to 4K60. The Steam Deck docks just as happily, though it’s a PC, so you may want to nudge the in-game resolution to match the TV rather than the handheld screen. Neither needs its bulky official dock for a hotel stay; the compact travel dock covers both.

A note on the hotel Wi-Fi

Once you’re set up, you’ll likely sign into game accounts over the hotel network, and hotel Wi-Fi is shared and often wide open. A VPN keeps that connection encrypted, and it’s the one piece of software genuinely worth running on the road. NordVPN is the pick for the reasons in our portable gaming VPN guide. If you’re travelling for a longer trip, the long-haul flight guide covers the power and battery side — and for the right games to have loaded, that guide has the full flight-ready list.