The one thing they do have to do is make you accept terms and conditions, and that almost always seems to be the primary driving force on these pages.
The one thing they do have to do is make you accept terms and conditions, and that almost always seems to be the primary driving force on these pages.
There are existing supported technologies which solve all of these issues. You can set up a Passpoint OSU solution, route users through T&Cs once and provision their device with a secure credential for encrypted autoconnection in the future. Or build said sign-in into the venue's mobile app. But that requires consensus from the corporate stakeholders (marketing and legal), who tend to prefer status quo.
There are folks working on these problems, both from wireless industry and venue side, and if anyone is really interested in helping I'd suggest looking into the Wireless Broadband Alliance as well as the Wi-Fi Alliance. Passpoint will eventually kill portals but it's taking forever due to these politics.