I frequently travel with one of my obi's. To "make it work" I plug the obi into a router, power, plug a phone in, and it starts working.
once you have registered the obi, you can move it around and it should work whenever you plug it in to a new router
EDIT-> I have not used my obi at a hotel yet... that presents other problems described in the next post
when you say "it would not recognize the device" what do you mean?