Weather Shows the Wrong City or the Wrong Unit
Why the weather block always follows the display's airport, how to change the city and the temperature unit, and how to recognise demo weather data.
Weather Shows the Wrong City or the Wrong Unit
If the weather on your screen names a city you did not expect, or shows °F where you wanted °C, this article explains where those two values come from and what you can change. The short version: there is no weather location setting in LobbyFlight. The weather always belongs to the airport the display is set to, so a wrong city is really a wrong airport.
How the display decides which weather to show
Weather is configured per display, not once for the whole hotel. Every display has its own airport, its own on/off switch for weather and its own temperature unit, which is why correcting one screen leaves the others exactly as they were.
When a display loads, it takes the first airport code assigned to it and looks up that airport's coordinates — from the built-in list of common airports, or from the airport record in the database for everything else. Those coordinates go to OpenWeatherMap, and the city shown on screen is the city stored for that airport. Nothing in this path uses your hotel address, an IP address or GPS, and there is no field anywhere for a custom city or custom coordinates. If you have read older instructions describing an "Automatic / Airport / Custom" location option, or a page under Settings → Weather, those do not exist.
Changing the city: change the display's airport
Because the city follows the airport, this is the only lever you have.
If the airport you need is not offered in that list, add it first under Portal → Airports; the display editor only offers airports that your account already covers.
One caveat worth knowing before you go hunting for a bug: the coordinates belong to the airport, not to your hotel, and the city label is the airport's city. A display set to VIE reports Vienna even though the airport itself sits in Schwechat. That is expected, and it is also the closest you can get — the weather cannot be pointed at a different town than the airport.
Changing between °C and °F
The unit lives next to the switch that turns weather on. Open Portal → Displays → [Display] and look at the Weather field: when the toggle is on, a small °C / °F control appears beside it. There is no separate Units page and no "Metric"/"Imperial" wording in the interface any more.
Wind speed is not configurable on its own — it follows the temperature unit, showing km/h alongside °C and mph alongside °F.
There is currently a known problem with saving this control: the value the editor sends does not match the values the database column accepts, so switching the unit may silently have no effect. If a display keeps showing °C after you selected °F, you are not doing anything wrong. Report it to support rather than trying further combinations.
When no weather appears at all
Two causes account for most empty weather areas, and neither is a location problem.
The weather widget needs a Pro or Premium plan. On a Basic plan the toggle in the display editor is greyed out with the hint "Not in your plan", and the API refuses the change with "Weather widget requires Pro plan or higher". See Choosing a plan and what it costs if you are unsure which plan you are on.
The airport has no coordinates on file. If the IATA code is neither in the built-in list nor in the airports table, the weather request answers with "Weather data not available for this airport" and the display simply renders nothing where the weather would be. Switching the display to a major airport for a moment is a quick way to confirm this; if weather appears there, the original airport record is the problem and support can fill in its coordinates.
When the numbers do not match reality
The most common reason is that you are not looking at real weather. If the server has no valid OpenWeatherMap key, the weather is filled in with demo values instead of failing visibly — which looks exactly like "the weather is wrong". Demo data is recognisable: the temperature only ever lands between 17 °C and 23 °C, air pressure is always 1013 hPa, sunrise reads 06:45 and sunset 18:30, and the country is reported as AT no matter which airport is selected. The same fallback kicks in when the weather provider returns an error. Nothing in the portal fixes this, so contact support with the display name and the airport code if you see those tells.
If the data is real but stale, that is caching rather than an error. Current conditions are cached for 30 minutes on the server and the forecast for an hour, and the screen itself asks for new weather every 30 minutes. Clearing the browser cache or hard-reloading the screen does not shorten that — the only thing that helps is waiting out the window.
Two more details that occasionally get reported as bugs: the forecast is always shown when data is available and cannot be switched off, with the header showing two days and the full weather widget three, each taken from the midday reading. And the sunrise and sunset times are formatted in Austrian German convention, so they stay in 24-hour form regardless of the display language.
After you save
You do not need to reload anything. Displays fetch their configuration every 20 seconds, so a new airport or a toggled weather widget appears within moments, and a unit change triggers a fresh weather request immediately. If a change has not shown up after a minute or so, treat it as a connection problem with that screen rather than a caching one.
If it is still wrong
When you contact support, the three things that shorten the exchange are the display name as it appears in Portal → Displays, the airport code that display is set to, and the city name currently printed on screen next to the city you expected. That is enough to tell an airport-record problem from a plan problem from demo data.