Having an extensive 802.11 background and having designed various type of WLAN networks over the years i learned quickly that hotels spend little money on hotel wireless. In fact, Im a frequent traveler and i cant tell you how many times you could gain access to the routers and or aps with the default values. I've seen some really scary designs where high mW radios with high gain antennas have been used which isnt ideal for reliable connectivity.

In most cases, the easiest way to secure a public wireless solution is via an appliance like bluesocket or asa where you can block peer to peer connections and do https connections .However layer 2 is still wide open and will be for sometime ....

FYI -- Microwaves have a tendency to live in the back end of the 2.4 GHz spectrum. With that being said of your personal AP is near a MW, i might suggest putting it on channel 1 ....

There are a wealth of tools currently available on the internet namely BackTrack 3 distro. I personally use the LIVE CD and find it very helpful. A quick google search will yield hours of reading to get you started.