What a LobbyFlight Display Needs to Run

This article answers one question: what do you have to buy, mount and open before a LobbyFlight board works in your lobby. Everything below is a requirement the product itself imposes. Where LobbyFlight has no opinion — panel brand, mounting hardware, cabling — this article stays quiet rather than inventing a specification you would then shop against.

The screen

Use a screen of 32 inches or larger in landscape orientation. That is the same recommendation the portal gives you next to the live preview under Displays → open a display → Preview & URL, and the reason is legibility: a guest reads a flight board from across the lobby, not from a desk.

The board is designed at 1920 × 1080, and the slide editor draws your info slides on exactly that canvas. A Full HD panel therefore shows what you designed pixel for pixel. A larger panel with the same 16:9 shape scales cleanly, so a 43-inch or 55-inch screen is a size decision rather than a compatibility one.

Portrait works too, and it is a first-class option rather than a workaround. The portrait canvas is 1080 × 1920, and the slide editor toolbar lets you switch between Landscape (16:9) and Portrait (9:16), with Reset Portrait to Landscape Layout to undo a portrait design if you change your mind. You do not have to configure the orientation anywhere else: the board measures its own window and renders the portrait stage whenever the screen is taller than it is wide. Mount the panel the way the wall wants it, then design to match.

The device behind the screen

A LobbyFlight display is a web page. Whatever opens that page full-screen in a current browser is a valid player: an Android TV box behind the panel, a small Windows or macOS machine, a Chromebox, or a smart TV whose browser is up to date. LobbyFlight itself asks for Android 8.0 or newer on Android hardware. Beyond that, the practical requirement is that the browser is current and updates itself, because that is what keeps the board rendering correctly over the years it will hang on that wall.

One browser capability is a genuine floor rather than a nice-to-have. When you save display settings in the portal, LobbyFlight uses the BroadcastChannel API to tell a display open in the same browser to reload immediately, so your change appears on the screen while you are still standing in front of it. Chrome, Edge and Firefox have supported this for years; Safari only supports it from version 15.4. On an older Safari the board still renders, but a settings change is not applied instantly — it arrives on the next configuration poll instead.

Internet Explorer, Opera Mini, UC Browser and anything predating 2020 cannot run the board at all. These browsers do not support the modern JavaScript the application ships.

Display modes, and the hardware each one implies

When you create a display you pick a Display Mode, and the choice has hardware consequences:

TV Display is the passive mode. There is no touch handling, the flight list auto-scrolls continuously and the board rotates through its pages without interruption. This is the right mode for a panel nobody can reach.

Touch Screen enables guest search and pauses both auto-scroll and rotation for 30 seconds after someone touches the screen, so a guest who is reading is not scrolled away from. It only makes sense on an actual touch panel.

Website Widget behaves like touch mode but is sized for embedding the board in a page of your own.

Which modes your account can use depends on your plan, so check Feature limits by plan before you buy a touch panel.

What the display needs from your network

The display talks almost exclusively to its own LobbyFlight address over HTTPS on port 443. Port 80 is not required: the application sends HSTS with preload, so browsers go straight to HTTPS. There is no WebSocket connection and nothing long-lived for a firewall to cut — the board works by making short, repeated HTTPS requests:

It re-fetches its configuration every 20 seconds, which is why a change you save in the portal shows up on the wall within moments even on a device the portal cannot reach directly.

It refreshes flight data at your plan's interval: every 60 minutes on Basic, every 30 minutes on Pro, every 5 minutes on Premium.

It sends a heartbeat every 5 minutes so the portal knows the screen is alive.

Two destinations matter for a restrictive firewall. The first is the address of the display itself — normally your LobbyFlight URL, but if you run a white-label setup on your own domain, that domain is the one to allow. The second is *.public.blob.vercel-storage.com, where hotel and display logos are stored; block it and the board renders with missing logos. Weather does not need an exception, because LobbyFlight fetches it server-side and hands it to the display as part of its own response.

For bandwidth, LobbyFlight does not enforce a threshold, and any connection that reliably loads ordinary web pages is enough. The traffic is small data requests on the intervals above, plus images at load time. What matters far more than raw speed is stability, so prefer a wired connection, and prefer 5 GHz Wi-Fi to 2.4 GHz where wiring is not practical. The network must also let the display through without a captive portal that needs a human to click "accept" after every reboot.

What happens when the connection drops

Short outages do not require perfect uptime, and it helps to know exactly how LobbyFlight reacts. The browser detects the loss of connectivity and the board shows an offline indicator while keeping the last flight data on screen, rather than going blank. In the portal, a display is only reported as offline after 12 minutes without a heartbeat. Since a heartbeat is due every five minutes, 12 minutes is two missed beats plus a little slack: a screen that genuinely went dark is flagged quickly, while one that merely stuttered is not. If a display still reads as online three minutes after you unplugged the router, that is expected — wait out the full window before you start troubleshooting. Offline behaviour and caching covers this in more detail.

Guest phones

If you use the guest companion page, that is a second surface with its own requirements, and they are different from the lobby screen's. The page runs in the guest's own mobile browser and installs a service worker, so any modern mobile browser can open it. Push notifications are the one feature with a hard floor: on iPhone and iPad, web push needs iOS 16.4 or newer. Guests on older iOS versions can use the page normally but will not receive push notifications. See The guest page.

How many screens your plan covers

Hardware planning runs into a product limit before it runs into a network one. Basic covers one display, Pro covers three, and Premium is unlimited. If you are planning a second screen for the restaurant or the conference floor, confirm your plan covers it before you order the panel. Running multiple screens explains how several displays are managed from one account.

Testing before you commit

You do not have to buy anything to find out whether a screen and a player device work together. Open the demo board at lobbyflight.com/demo on the exact hardware you are considering and leave it running for a day. It shows a fully configured board with weather, info slides and multiple languages, so what you see is representative of the real thing. Demo mode explains what the demo does and does not include.

If you are unsure whether a specific panel or box will work, write to info@lobbyflight.com with the model details before you order.

Next steps

Quick setup guide walks you from an empty account to a board on the wall.

Setting up an Android display covers the player device end to end.

Network and firewall configuration is the detailed version of the network section above, for handing to IT.

Activating kiosk mode keeps the board full-screen and stops guests from browsing away from it.

What a LobbyFlight Display Needs to Run