Still-At-Home Travel Hacks

Still-At-Home Travel Hacks

1. I would only recommend staying in hotels if you’re traveling with your significant other and are interested in 5-Star accommodations for the night. I’ve stayed in hotels very minimally while traveling. Typically, I like to stick to hostels or couch-surfing. Hostels are my go-to choices for the most part because they give you everything a hotel will give you, minus a little bit of privacy. Hostels are a blessing not to be taken advantage of! They supply you with free WiFi, sometimes free breakfast (it isn’t hard to find), hot (or cold) showers, lockers to store your belongings, a bed with comfy sheets for you to sleep with, city maps, tourist information, daily activities for you to embark on, and even job listings so you can make money while you’re traveling to support your expenses! How great is that? (I will be creating a blog post within the next few weeks on hostels. Subscribe by email so you don’t miss out on all the advantages, pros and cons of staying in hostels!)

2. Always roll your clothes when packing. I can’t tell you how often I’ve had to re-pack my boyfriends carry on because he can’t seem to fit more than 3 pairs of a pants and a sweater inside. Rolling your clothes instead of folding them allows you to fit more things inside. Optimize the space inside of your suitcase by rolling underwear and socks within your shirts or pants — you’ll be surprised how much extra room this can save!

3. It’s important to have extra copies of your identification on you. Scan and email your documents to yourself. In some cases, it can’t hurt to send an extra copy to your mom or dad so they can quickly provide them for you if you need it (Imagine someone steals your phone and/or laptop. That would really suck, right? You would probably panic. Imagine then having so much anxiety and stress you forget your passwords to your email to log on and retrieve these spare copies. Your parents can serve as an extra reliable source if the time calls for it. Besides, they’ll love that you’re taking extra precautionary measures and involving them). Taking these extra precautionary measures provide an extra copy of each of your documents in the event of loss or theft. As a good majority of you who are reading this post probably are, I am an iPhone user. Traveling with iPhones are great because once I email the documents to myself, I always open the email on my iPhone and save them onto iBooks as PDFs. Your iBooks acts as an offline record which is helpful if you don’t have access to WiFi, or internet in general.

4. Notify your credit/debit card company before you leave which countries or cities you will be going to and the dates you will be there for. This will ensure that you have your card authorized for your foreign destination and it will be ready to use at your discretion. This prevents your credit/debit card company from suspecting suspicious activity. After all, you don’t exactly want to be out to eat at a restaurant and have a bill of £58.67 with a card that will only keep declining, do you?

5. Mark your baggage as fragile. I read this online by someone who found it to be a great way to ensure that your baggage is handled correctly. My boyfriend works at the airport and trust me, your bag is getting thrown around like there’s no tomorrow. This happens because they have no way of knowing there are items other than clothes in your bag. When you mark your luggage as fragile, your luggage is kept at the top of the bunch. Marking your luggage as fragile will also help your bag be one of the first to be released — talk about a time saver!