They probably know what it is but are just not familiar with the term.
I find the OS' captive portal detection to sometimes be flaky, so I often just directly visit www.neverssl.com to reliably trigger the captive portal redirect.
The basic workflow at Gateway side is inspecting all HTTP port 80 traffic (with iptables or others), If the URL is about internet detection, reply a 301 redirect to the captive portal URL.
But the URL is too complex among different vendor:
I find the OS' captive portal detection to sometimes be flaky, so I often just directly visit www.neverssl.com to reliably trigger the captive portal redirect.