Why on earth do they have a different SSID at each site? Surely they could have had one common SSID and then you would only ever have to set it up once.
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Well yes, but...On all the apps I have that do this (wemo, chromecast come to mind) it's insanely buggy and horrible. I'd rather chance it with poor mobile signal than have it half connected to wifi and refusing to pick up an IP address leaving me having to go fiddling in the settings to disable wifi.
Top tip incidentally, off topic but whatever - never set public wifi to automatically connect. Otherwise anyone with a hotspot anywhere could set their wifi name to EH_Chievely and password Ecotricity and next thing you know your phone is connected (presuming you notice) and they're sniffing your packets. Same goes for O2_wifi or Costa_Coffee etc.
Any mobiles apps really must assume that all data connections are insecure, so any that don't use https to talk to servers ought to be banned from the relevant app stores. I know that the Play store policies for developers says that apps must "Handle the user data securely, including transmitting it using modern cryptography (for example, over HTTPS)" and I would assume that Apple do something similar. So that means the only data your phone should be sending that you might not want sniffed would be web page browsing, and again there are ways to protect yourself (on Android go to Chrome settings and turn on data saver: that ensures all non-https traffic is routed through a secure link to Google's servers where it is compressed and images and video are scaled for your device). Or just avoid putting personal data in any non-encrypted web pages.
So in short, yes there's a potential risk but in practice you should be safe on any public wifi provided you are sensible.
BTW, on of my favourite stories is the "Free Wifi" peer-to-peer network you see mostly at airports (though hopefully not so much now as a few years ago). It's reckoned to be the first computer virus that evolved spontaneously instead of being deliberately written by a human being and was due to a 'feature' in Microsoft Windows prior to Windows 7. In the affected versions of Windows after you had connected once to a peer-to-peer wifi network your machine would thereafter broadcast the SSID of the last used peer-to-peer network whenever it was looking for a wifi connection. Someone, somewhere in the world created a link called 'Free Wifi', lots of people who saw it would try connecting, realise there was no actual free wifi, disconnect, but thereafter everywhere they went and weren't connected to anything their machine would also be advertising the same network and so more people would try to connect and become 'infected'.
I guess it would have been too much to hope that the DBT units had (or could be fitted with) Bluetooth LE hardware. That's what they should really be using to control charging from a mobile phone app: there would be no need for any kind of pairing or setting up networks, the phone could just pick up the ids of all nearby chargers, get you to confirm which one and which connector you''re using, and off you go.
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