Tips if you travel (often)
✈️ I travel (a lot)
My job gives me plenty of opportunities and one of the best is that I travel all over the world - well, to the USA, Canada and across Europe but I still feel privileged to get to do that - the USA is one of my favourite countries on Earth and until very recently, I thought my favourite place was New York City.
How wrong I was - having just returned from Phoenix, Arizona - Sedona is up there with one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.
The thing about travelling is that you learn ‘hacks’ and you experience things on such a regular basis that I have compiled a list of non-negotiable and tips to fast track your travel experience.
Aside from the usual - taking the right travel plugs,
🧳 Buy expensive luggage and customise it.
Casey Neistat taught me this but it’s proved INVALUABLE. When I first started travelling I used the spare suitcase we had in our attic and it was bland, boring and more importantly, like everyone else’s.
When you travel often, you see varying degrees of luggage cases - from the bog standard fabric cases to the prestige (and highly coveted in travelling circles) Rimowa cases. The thing is, infrequent travellers use these cases as a method to transport their belongings from their home to just one other location which is probably their holiday home/hotel.
When you transit through airport after airport and you use the hold luggage option, waiting and watching conveyor belts of luggage can become monotonous and boring.
That’s why I elected to take the route of Casey and spray paint the absolute sh*t out of my case - no more wasted minutes, no more searching a similar black case and no more panic as another black case wonders past me.
The case below was the first iteration of my luggage and this is where I learned my lesson to buy a more expensive luggage set - this was the first suitcase I ever customised and despite being one of the favourite things I owned, it ceased to work after 8-9 months so I bought a new more expensive set.
I now use a cabin and holdall set from Antler - you can see the set I use here.
⏱️ Wear two watches.
I own an Apple Watch and despite it being a large screen - having the local time and home time on the same screen, the older you get, the harder it is to decipher and see the different times.
Trust me, I’ve experimented with the different watch faces - having the digital faces, analogue faces with an alternative digital face and then an analogue face with the home time calculated in +/- hours - none worked for me and I would end up just counting back the hours in my head.
That was until I recently bought myself a simple and easy to use Casio wrist watch and my wore it on my right wrist (I wear my Apple Watch on my left wrist) - the ease and the simplicity of wearing two watches was something to behold.
Rolling over in my bed after waking up and looking at my right wrist to know what time it is back home was the best experience - smart watches, pah! who needs them!
🏨 If you have a choice, book a brand.
I cannot emphasise this enough - independent, standalone hotels can be brilliant but you always run the risk of the hotel equivalent of a Catfish. I have booked hotels based on their online photos, the ‘great’ reviews and then turned up to the hotel only to find our that I’m staying in a cat litter tray and I’ve got a bag of peanuts for dinner.
No joke, I once turned up to a hotel to find brown smudge marks on the sheets and I opened the curtains to find that I overlooked the indoor pool, which was green.
I didn’t stay there long - I used the free WiFi to book another hotel and left almost immediately.
So if you want to have a safe and pleasant travel experience I would say that you need to book a Marriott, Hilton or another well known hotel chain. You are guaranteed to have some level of customer service, some level of cleanliness and you’d get to change rooms if you found anything untoward.
*I have plenty of horror stories from staying in ‘off grid’ hotels - even in the UK. I once turned up to a hotel room which had a TV which was smashed up, I stayed in a hotel with a padlock on the inside of the door, to prevent other guests getting in and I once stayed in a hotel which one floor down from a nightclub (which wasn’t actually as based as it sounds!).
🧻 Put the towels up high.
I’ve read plenty of ‘travel hacks’ posts on LinkedIn and most of them are bland, samey and regurgitate the same old tripe but I saw one recently which changed my perception on what to do with towels once you’d finished with them.
I’ve always been one to put the towels in the bath once I’m finished with them or leave them on the bathroom floor (in a heap) but I now leave my towels in the sink at waist level - always.
It will mean housekeeping don’t need to bend down, they don’t need to be picking up towels everyday and having them in the sink clearly shows that you’ve used them and they don’t need to strain to get them.
🛌 Never make your bed.
Another thing you need to realise about room service is that when you leave the room and check out is that they make over your room completely - your efforts to make the room as nice as possible, making the bed and tidying the sheets are completely fruitless.
So why make your bed?
You’ve been conditioned to believe that it’s polite.
I do the complete opposite - I strip the bed entirely, removing the sheets, stripping the pillows and piling it up in a big bundle.
It saves the housekeeping a task and it means I don’t need to do a job which I’d normally do at home.
🪙 Tip the housekeeping (and be polite).
Housekeeping is what your mum did when you were little - they make your bed, give you fresh towels and make sure the toilet that you sit on is clean and fresh.
That’s how I see it - they do the dirty and annoying jobs that you don’t want to which is why, whenever I am travelling and I’m faced with my last night in a hotel, I empty my wallet of all my change and leave a tip (along with a note).
I also speak to the housekeeping teams if I see them around the hotel - nothing beats an extra bottle of water, a fresh towel when you need one and they appreciate you taking the time to speak to them.
Manners and politeness cost nothing.
🤙🏻 Appearances are deceiving.
Eating out abroad can be hazardous. Food poisoning, poor hygiene standards and undercooked food are all things you have to be on high alert for but appearances can be deceiving - when dining abroad, most of the bad experiences that I have had have been from ‘chain’ restaraunts. The restaurants which have an established name and are often franchises.
For example, the two worst places I ate on my most recent trip - In and Out Burger and Buffalo Wild Wings.
Two perfectly decent restaurants but the quality just wasn’t there.
The two best places I ate (apart from Cracker Barrel which is my favourite breakfast place in the US) were small independent restaurants - often run by a family and quite often, where you need to wait to be seated because the place is rammed with locals.
From the outside, these small restaurants look really bad - old signage, dusty exteriors and expired ‘specials’ boards but when you get in there, they are OUTSTANDING culinary establishments.
Places which have been made on reputation, quality and do not market themselves - these are places you need to eat at.
You can only find these places in two ways -
Trial and Error - trying lots of places and seeing which ones hit best.
Google Reviews - research places which are not on the traditional paths, they don’t sit in a district surrounded by other restaurants and they don’t have competition.
One point to note - make sure your restaurant of choice doesn’t have a nightclub attached to it - like one Mexican restaurant in New Jersey had - having a DJ shouting down a mic asking the women to twerk whilst your eating a taco is a different vibe.
🤨 Groups mean something.
This is a personal request and one of the single most frustrating things I experience when travelling. Flying often and being a part of an airline reward system means that you can get moved up the ‘boarding’ order into higher groups - basically, you get on the flight before anyone else.
The problem with people who don’t fly often is that they fail to understand the boarding process.
The people who fly once a year are normally in Groups 7-9 - people who fly often are in Groups 3-5 (Business Class and higher members are in Groups 1-2) - the problem is that the people in the later groups get anxious, they want to board and they can’t wait to board.
They believe that standing right next to the boarding gate will mean they can get onto the airplane quicker, they don’t want to miss that Group 7 call and they will block anyone trying to get on.
Please - if you are boarding in any group higher than 6 - wait in your seats to be called.
🧑🏻🦯 A carabiner clips solves everything.
One thing that I’ve added to my luggage setup recently is a heavy duty carabiner clip. This clips onto the handles of my holdal (which sits on top of my cabin bag) and it allows me to ‘sneak’ on another piece of luggage/clothing/bottle/cap just by clipping it to the outside of my bag.
Cabin crew rarely notice and the possibilities are endless.
I am one to always wear a baseball cap and packing them inside of my cabin bag leads to crushed caps (sounds like something that no-one wants) and by clipping it to the outside of my bag, it allows me to carry it on without a fuss.
I also have a bottle with a loop on the lid so if I need to carry on my water (and a full bottle of water is something of a luxury when you’re packing light) then again, I don’t have to worry about stuffing it into my luggage.
💼 Take a duffel bag with you.
On almost every trip, I pack with just enough to get me through - this means I travel light and often only take my cabin bag and a holdall (no checked luggage) but no trip is complete without a trip to Walmart (sweets & Cheetos pasta for the kids), TJ Maxx (TShirts & Rae Dunn homeware) or obviously Bath and Bodyworks (candles, bodywash, fragrances).
When you’ve packed as tightly and as efficiently as possible, the likelihood is that once you begin to purchase just the smallest amount of Cheetos pasta (if you’ve never tried it - get it in your life) then you’re beginning to run out of room and you need to have another bag.
So I purchased a BIG duffel bag - it came from amazon and it’s by no means the most expensive piece of luggage I own and it’s not the most rigid but this allows me to fold it completely up into a small pocket in my cabin bag and when I purchase anything - I compensate by throwing my dirty laundry into the duffel bag.
I hear you cry already - but don’t you need to purchase a checked bag on your trip home? Not if you’re in a Group 3 boarding group (which I now fit into) which allows you one free checked bag.
Want to know about the Group structure? See above.
💳 Collect something. You’ll be thankful.
I mean this - every trip is special and I always collect the same thing (and have done for over two years now) - I collect hotel room key cards.
I have over 75 hotel room keycards in my collection (which represent well over 100 nights of travel) in my collection and almost everyone is different.
I know other people who collect boarding passes - I’ve started to develop a little habit of taking the branded pens from hotels too now so my collection of those is growing but photos are good, towels are nice (especially if you take your trunks) and the little notepads are fun but my hotel keycard collection reminds me directly of the hotels I stay in.
I once stayed in a BRAND NEW hotel in Houston, Texas called The Laura - this wasn’t part of a huge chain of hotels and it had literally opened the week before I decided to stay there so the pricing on the hotel was super low.
The hotel featured a shower in the middle of the bedroom with a glass side which allowed you to shower whilst looking out over the city of Houston - it was an amazing hotel room.
The price of a nights stay at this hotel has now sky-rocketed and it’s completely unaffordable (when I stayed it was around £120-130 - the price now is over £400 a night).
I have the gold hotel keycard from this hotel and it was one of the best hotels I’ve stayed in.
What will you collect?