Why Route Everything?
By default a VPN sends all your traffic through the tunnel. That is simple and secure, but it costs you speed, bandwidth, and battery, and it can break local services like a printer or a smart home hub that expects to talk to your phone on the LAN.
What Split Tunneling Lets You Do
Split tunneling routes a chosen subset of traffic through the VPN while everything else uses the direct connection. Two modes exist: include lists (only listed apps use the tunnel) and exclude lists (everything uses the tunnel except listed apps). For travel, an exclude list is usually the right shape.
The Practical Travel Setup
- Tunnel: banking, work email, password manager, and any government or airline portal you log into.
- Direct: video streaming that needs the fastest local route, and apps on the local network like a hotel casting device.
- Local: anything that must reach the hotel network itself, such as a Chromecast or a room IoT device.
Getting this balance right means your bank session is protected on airport Wi-Fi while your evening streaming does not bounce through a faraway server.
Watch Out for DNS Leaks
Split tunneling only helps if DNS stays on the right path. If a split app sends DNS queries outside the tunnel, an observer on the network can still see which domains you visit. Check that your provider routes DNS through the tunnel for protected apps and set a manual DNS server if the client allows it.
When Not to Split
If you are on a truly hostile network, such as a public hotspot in a transit hub, consider a full tunnel even if it is slower. The extra milliseconds are a fair price for not having to trust the split configuration to catch every app.
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