The Display URL Shows the Wrong Board or Nothing at All
How to find the exact address for a screen, and what to check when a panel shows a demo hotel, the wrong screen, or a configuration error.
The Display URL Shows the Wrong Board or Nothing at All
This article explains what a screen is actually telling you when the display address does not do what you expect, where the correct address for each screen lives in the portal, and which causes are worth checking in what order.
The most important thing to know first: an address with a wrong or unknown hotel ID does not produce an error. It produces a board. If a panel in your lobby is showing a hotel called Demo Hotel Vienna with flights from Vienna Airport (VIE), you are not looking at a broken page — you are looking at the demo configuration that LobbyFlight falls back to whenever it cannot match the address to one of your properties. That is the single most common form of "the URL doesn't work", and it looks nothing like a failure.
What the screen is actually showing you
There are only three things a display page can show, and each one points somewhere different.
The demo board. The hotel name reads "Demo Hotel Vienna" and the flights are VIE departures and arrivals. The address was reachable, the page loaded, but the hotel ID in it did not match a property in your account. Go to "The hotel ID in the address is wrong" below.
Configuration Error. A red panel with the heading Configuration Error, the line "Unable to load display configuration", and a Retry button. This is the only error message the display page has. It means the configuration request itself failed rather than returning something, so the device's network connection and the platform status are what to check.
Initializing Flight Display… on a dark background. This is the loading state, not an error. If a screen sits on it, the device has opened the page but has not finished fetching a configuration — again a connectivity question, not an address question.
Anything else — "Hotel not found", "Invalid hotel ID", a 404 page — does not come from LobbyFlight. If you see one of those, the device is showing you a message from the browser, the network, or a captive portal, and the address never reached us.
Where the correct address lives
Every screen has its own address, and the portal prints it in three places. You do not have to assemble it by hand, and you should not: the hotel ID is a UUID, and a single missing character turns a working address into the demo board.
The fastest route is Displays. Open https://lobbyflight.com/login, go to Displays in the left-hand navigation, and read the address directly off each screen's card — it sits on the card in plain text, with a copy button next to it whose tooltip reads Copy address. A small shield icon in front of the address means that screen is served from your own verified domain.
If you want the address together with a QR code, open the screen itself: Displays → open the screen → Display URL. That section shows the address in a read-only field with a Copy button and an Open button, and underneath it QR Code for Easy Setup, which encodes exactly the same address. Scanning that code with the display device's camera is the most reliable way to get a long UUID onto a tablet without typing it.
When you are setting up a screen for the first time, the setup assistant at /portal/setup ends on the same thing: the finished address, a Copy URL button, an Open link, and a QR code to scan with the display device.
What a correct address looks like
For a screen served from lobbyflight.com, the address has this shape:
https://lobbyflight.com/display/<hotel-id>?display=<display-id>Both parts are UUIDs, so the hotel ID looks like a1b2c3d4-e5f6-7890-abcd-ef1234567890. The ?display= parameter names one specific screen, which is what makes it possible for a property to run several screens with different content.
The short form without the parameter, https://lobbyflight.com/display/<hotel-id>, still works. It does something specific, though, and that behaviour surprises people: it shows the active screen you edited most recently. On a property with one screen, that is the screen you meant. On a property with three, the panel in the lobby can quietly change its content the next time somebody edits a different screen in the portal. If you run more than one screen, use the full address with ?display= on every device.
If a screen has a verified custom domain, its address is simply https://<your-domain> and replaces the lobbyflight.com address entirely. The portal shows the custom domain, not the long form, once the domain is verified.
The hotel ID in the address is wrong
This is the case that ends in the demo board. It happens when only part of the UUID was copied, when the address was typed from a screenshot, or when the address came from a different property in an account that has several.
The fix is not to correct the address by hand but to replace it: copy it from the screen's card in Displays, or scan the QR code in the screen's Display URL section with the display device. Paste rather than type, and then check the hotel name on the resulting board — if it is your hotel's name, the address is right.
If your account holds several properties, make sure you are looking at the right one before you copy. The property switcher at the top of the portal decides which property's screens Displays lists.
The address is right but the wrong content appears
Two settings can send a correct address to content you did not expect.
The address has no `?display=` parameter. As described above, it then resolves to the most recently edited active screen. Copy the screen-specific address from Displays and reload the panel.
The screen is switched off. Each card in Displays has a power control that toggles the screen between active and inactive, and an inactive screen is not served. An address pointing at a switched-off screen falls through to another active screen of the same property, or — if there is no active screen left — to the demo board. In the screen list an inactive screen is labelled Switched off, so this is quick to confirm.
The address used to work and now redirects to lobbyflight.com
This is the custom-domain case. When a screen is served from your own domain, that domain is resolved to your hotel on every request. If the domain is not verified, or stops being verified, that resolution fails and the request is redirected to lobbyflight.com — the marketing site, not your board.
Check the domain status in the screen's Display URL section: a verified domain is shown there with a Custom Domain badge, and the screen list marks it with a shield icon. If the badge is missing, the screen is currently addressed by its lobbyflight.com address, which you can copy from the same section and use in the meantime.
The screen or the property no longer exists
Addresses do not expire and are not rotated. The hotel ID and the display ID are permanent identifiers; there is no security reset, no migration and no support procedure that hands you a new display address. A screen's address changes only if the screen is deleted and created again, or if a custom domain is added or removed.
A property disappears in three ways, all of them deliberate: somebody removes the property in the portal, an administrator deletes it, or the organization is closed — in which case the data is kept for a 30-day grace period and removed afterwards. Even then the address still resolves. It shows the demo board, because that is what an unknown hotel ID produces.
If a screen was deleted by accident, create a new one in Displays and distribute its new address. Be aware that each plan includes a fixed number of screens: the header of Displays shows your current count against that maximum, and when you are at the limit the Create button becomes Upgrade plan instead of creating a screen.
Billing state does not affect the display address
Whether a subscription is active, past due or cancelled has no bearing on whether a display address resolves. The configuration a screen fetches is not gated on subscription status, so a lapsed subscription is not an explanation for a dark or wrong panel, and renewing one will not repair an address that was mistyped. You can see the subscription status and the current period end under Billing in the portal if you want to confirm the state of the account, but treat it as a separate question from this one.
Diagnosing from the portal instead of the device
Before walking to the lobby, look at what the portal already knows. Each screen carries a status derived from its heartbeat, and the wording tells you which problem you have:
When you want to look at a board yourself without disturbing that status, append ?preview=1 to the address. A normal page load sends heartbeats, so checking a lobby screen from your laptop would otherwise report that screen as online while the actual panel is dark. With ?preview=1 the board renders and reports nothing. The portal's own preview and the "open on this device" action already use it.
When the platform itself is the problem
If several screens show Configuration Error at once, or other pages on lobbyflight.com fail alongside them, check https://lobbyflight.com/status. It lists the current status of each service, uptime over time, and any open incidents and planned maintenance. That page is the authoritative answer to "is it us or is it you", and it saves the round trip through support.
If none of this explains it
Write to info@lobbyflight.com and include the things that let someone reproduce the problem rather than guess at it: the exact address you are using, pasted rather than retyped; a photo or screenshot of what the screen shows; the name of the screen in Displays and the status it reports there; and when the address last worked, if it ever did.