I travel for work and often have to use hotel internet. I have a paid VPN service which is great. Unfortunately, I can’t use my paid service to access my office’s remote server. I know it is also a VPN connection, but I don’t know much more than that. I just hate having to be unprotected on the internet just to access some work files
Your company should have provided a VPN client or at least connection details to connect to their VPN.
This would be a call to my employer’s IT help desk if I had this problem.
Your personal VPN service has nothing to do with the work VPN service.
In fact, the way you connect to one remotely, is probably different than the way you connect to the other.
As the other poster said, call your employer’s IT desk, or better yet, take them the laptop next time you are there, and tell them to setup an easy option on it to connect to the work vpn.
Another thing to consider is with all the work from home some company networks couldn’t handle all network traffic and didn’t use full tunnels… I guess they didn’t want employees playing music streaming through the vpn server… so some traffic may not be on corporate vpns
Sooo we’re a small company. The IT guy is my old roommate we’re not talking 
I also really don’t want him to get access to my personal/work laptop if possible. He did some shady shit when we lived together
many companies block incoming VPN connects from other Public VPN services due to security. I’d just use the public wifi to connect to your company VPN and browse through that, everything will be tunneled back to your client without the public wifi seeing it
Your own vpn service connects you to that provider’s vpn server, not YOUR company’s vpn server. Nobody needs access to your laptop but you do need to have a vpn client for your company’s vpn. They should be able to provide you a download for that and instructions on how to set it up. If you and the IT guy are not on speaking terms, talk to his/her supervisor and explain your needs.