If you are like us, you frequently take your laptop on the road and are continually in search of places where you can access the Internet and get a little work done outside of your home or office. It’s not always easy to find places that offer free wi-fi services, and at one point we broke down and paid for a subscription to Boingo to increase our chances of getting Internet access while on the road.

We might have saved a few bucks if we’d known about Wi-Fi Free Spot, a comprehensive online directory of businesses, airports, hotels and parks that offer free Internet access. You can browse by state, city or type of business. We did a quick search and discovered 30 locations within a few miles of our office that offer free wireless Internet access, most of which we had no idea offered this service.

If you still can’t find a location near you, check out this post about free wi-fi directories on makeuseof.com. Here’s a list of the websites they recommend for tracking down free wireless Internet service:

Wi-Fi Hotspot Directory – lists over 30,000 hotspots worldwide, not all of which are free, so be sure to click the FREE box during your search.

Our Results – did not find any locations near us (and we are located in a fairly big city).

Laptop Friendly Cafes – the name pretty much says it all, this site helps you locate cafes offering free wi-fi — mostly in cities.

Our Results – our city was not available.

WaiFi – powered by users, this site interfaces with google maps to provide instant maps for the wi-fi locations.

Our Results – located three in our neighborhood, two of which were for UPS stores, and two of the three results were about 25 minutes outside of our neighborhood.

FREE-hotspot – similar to Waifi – a little more user-friendly, but with a smaller directory.

Our Results – located 5 in our area, but left out 3 locations that we know offer free wi-fi in our neighborhood.

So, we had mixed results with these searches, but nonetheless they are great resources for when you are traveling, particularly if traveling abroad and want to find free wirelss Internet services — or when you just need a change of scenery from the office. And keep in mind that each of these services may work better in other locations (as we only tested one town).

Want to locate even more Wi-Fi Hotspots in your area? Check out this article published last year on makeuseof.com.