48 Travel Hacks To Holiday Like A Pro
By popular demand, here is every tested travel hack to save you time, money and stress.
There are so many great quotes about travel that it’s hard to pick a favourite. But if you held a gun to my head, I’d probably say the well-worn cliche of "Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer” would be up there.
Yes, I know it’s an overworked phrase, however there’s no better way to describe the utter joy that comes from spending money on something that brings so much happiness.
My husband and I have basically been on the road since 2020, travelling in some form or another. There was a campervan around Australia for 6 months, another half a year in Darwin to ride out the pandemic, a few months exploring the Greek Islands, and the last few years using Mallorca as a base to catapult ourselves easily into Europe and beyond.
We never tire of the adventures, and in the last year I’ve visited 21 different countries, ranging from a few days to a few months. Some of it was for work, but most for pure pleasure. We’ve both continued to work remotely along the way, our normal schedule being online Monday to Wednesday, then spending Thursday to Sunday hiking, swimming, eating, drinking and enjoyable whatever part of the world is nearby.
As part of this, we’ve gotten reaaallllly good at all aspects of travel: the researching, planning, travelling and experiencing. My Instagram is now my travel diary, especially the ‘Adventures’ story highlights that help me remember some of the best memories.
Ben and I are asked every week how we travel. So for the last few months we’ve been collating every one of our travel hacks to help anyone be a better traveller and enjoy your holidays as much as you can. These tips will save you time, money and maybe even your relationship.
This is written primarily for Australian readers, so feel free to adapt some examples for your own country, and I’ve added some commissionable links throughout to help keep OUTLET going.
Instead of the usual One Useful Thing, this month there are 48 useful things.
One Useful Thing: 48 travel hacks to help you travel better.
These tips are broken up into what to do before you travel, as you’re booking, how to make the most of trip when you’re on it, and some of the things we’ve bought that have helped make it better. So here goes:
Before you travel
Use TripIt to put all your travel plans in one place. When you have bookings from different flights, rental cars, hotels and restaurants in various emails throughout your inbox, it helps to have one single source of truth for all your travel plans. We use TripIt religiously (if it’s not in TripIt, it’s not part of our plans!), as it helps us see any gaps in our schedule very easily. The best part is that you just forward your booking emails and it automatically compiles your itinerary for you. You can get TripIt to automatically scan your email for bookings or, even better, Ben and I each have a dedicated email address we forward bookings to, and it scans that inbox so we can 100% control what’s in there. Yes TripIt can be a bit clunky, but if you use it properly it’s a genuine lifesaver.
Link your Uber account to your Qantas Frequent flyer. Did you know that if you’re based in Australia you can earn QFF points every single time you travel to and from the airport? Link your apps here, then order your Uber to and from any airport via the Qantas app > Book > Uber. Every point adds up.
Learn some language before you go, it makes travel so much more enjoyable. I’m currently on an 800+ day Duolingo streak in Spanish (!), plus I have a regular teacher through iTalki, a site that connects language teachers with students for live online language lessons. It’s very good, pretty cheap and you can get $5 of free iTalki credits here.
Put all your expenses on your credit card and reap the frequent flyer points. This is not a new travel hack, but it’s still one of the most effective so I couldn’t leave it out. It only works, however, if you pay your card off each month and don’t accrue any interest. Extra points if you can also put businesses expenses on your card so you can really maximise the points.
Choose one airline to go all-in on. There’s no point spreading your point collecting around, so choose a Oneworld, Star Alliance or SkyTeam aligned airline and aim to get enough status with them that flying becomes that much more enjoyable through lounges, upgrades and other perks.
Get a Wise card to use overseas. This one has saved us so many times. Wise is a free multi-currency debit card with excellent rates for money transfers that basically allows you to open up a form of a bank account instantly in over 40 countries around the world. This really saved us when we were in the Turkish side of Cyprus and urgently needed a Turkish bank account in order to hire a car. It’s (so far) been fail-safe to withdraw funds from ATMs in dozens of countries, and if it ever gets lost of stolen, there’s only a finite amount of money on it. If you want zero fees on your first transfer up to $1k, sign up to Wise using my referral code here.
Determine a rough budget before you travel. One of the most useful tools in my book Work Backwards is a Backwards Budget, which helps you roughly determine how much you need to live the life you want before you spend it. You can play around with an interactive Excel or Google spreadsheet for free from my website when you download the worksheets that go alongside the book here.
Before you book
Sign up for Cash Rewards, and use it to get seriously good discounts on travel through most of the large travel aggregators like Booking.com and Expedia. If you want a $10 welcome bonus in your Cash Rewards account for free, sign up here and make a purchase of $20 or more within a fortnight. We always click from Cash Rewards before booking our travel and now have around $1K sitting in our account from actual dollar savings, it’s kinda wild.
Buy Airbnb gift cards if you’re making a large Airbnb booking (and it’s worth the hassle). You can save 3% to 5% on the total cost of the booking by buying gift cards before you book from places like Cash Rewards here. It is surprisingly easy to do for any large Airbnb bookings, it just requires some pre-planning.
Use a VPN if you want to log-in to an Australian website that needs you be located “in Australia” while you’re travelling overseas. There are loads of options but I use NordVPN for its ease and reliability. If you want 3 months free, sign up here.
Check to see if an Airbnb is listed elsewhere. Most accomodation is listed on multiple sites (like Vrbo or sometimes even direct) at varying prices. To check, upload one of the Airbnb listing photos into a reverse Google image search, or you can paste the link into HiChee. The right booking platform can save you a lot.
Search Airbnbs better. The default search setting on Airbnb isn’t always the best as its algorithm prioritises listings which give them the highest commission. If you use Chrome, use an extension called Firebnb to sort Airbnb listings by their actual ratings, a way better way to scroll through options.
Book your Airbnb via Qantas and get free QFF points. Just go to this page on Qantas’ website and it will redirect you to Airbnb to make your booking at no extra cost to you, just free Qantas points. It’s another way for the points to add up.
Always use Booking.com’s mobile app to book accomodation, and work your way up to a Genius Level 3 by making a few bookings. But here’s the expert-level hack: once you’ve found your accomodation, download the Booking.com app and book directly on there instead. Booking through the mobile app is usually at least 10% cheaper due to them having less third-party marketing costs.
Do a final check of your hotel booking on Agoda’s mobile app before booking. A last-minute check on your phone through the booking engine Agoda usually seems to undercut any other way. Download the Agoda app and try it next time you travel and you might just be shocked.
Price-match any big expenses. This one saved us literally thousands of dollars when we travelled around Australia in a campervan. We got a quote from one (very cheap) rental motorhome company, and then called up another (higher quality, more expensive) one and they price-matched it on the spot. This means we got the equivalent van for a lesser price. Most car hire, accomodation, van rental and other places do price matching (they just don’t advertise it and no one really takes them up on it).
Try to book flights early in the day. The earlier in the day a flight is, the less likely it is to be delayed. By the time the afternoon or evening flights are meant to depart, the plane has flown to and from a few destinations and all the small delays quickly accumulate.
Leave a spare seat between you on planes. If you’re travelling as two people - or really any combination of odd numbers - in economy, a favourite trick is to book an aisle seat for one person, and the window seat in the same row for the other. This leaves the middle seat spare and, more often than not, if it’s not a completely full flight these will be the last seats to be reserved. The worst case is that someone sits between you (who will happily switch if you want them to), and the best case is you will get all three seats to you and your partner.
Please get rental car excess insurance before you travel. A lot of credit cards have insurance included, or you can get a cheap stand-alone policy before you hire the car. This one move will save you money as well as the high-pressure upsells that ruin the start of every holiday. I’m so passionate about this that I wrote an entire OUTLET edition on how to hire a car well you can read here.
While you’re travelling
Use Timeshifter to minimise jet lag. This is a very useful app that tells you exactly when to sleep, have caffeine, take melatonin, and turn on or off lights on your international flights to bio-hack your way to less jet lag. I use it almost religiously (which sometimes means wandering around airports in sunglasses to decrease light expsoure), and it reduces my jet lag every time I travel. Get the Timeshifter app here.
Buy an eSIM for your phone and don’t worry about excess travel charges when abroad. We use Airalo, and you can sign up here for $5 off your first eSIM. If you’re away for a while and you have a flexible phone provider, you can even modify your Australian plan so you get the best of both worlds: an eSIM for international data, and your usual Australian SIM in your phone to be able to receive text messages (this is excellent so you can continue doing two-factor authentication from your bank etc while overseas).
Download your airline’s app. Every airline has its own mobile app, and they are usually full of things you can do easily directly through them, like checking-in, choosing your bag and tracking your flight. Some of them even allow you to follow your bag’s location and other cool features.
Track your flight. There’s nothing worse than sitting at an airport gate and wondering why your flight keeps getting delayed, or how long you can spend in the coffee shop before boarding. Go to a website like Flight Aware, type in your flight and it will show you the previous movements of your plane. This will show you if it’s even taken off yet from its previous destination, currently flying or landed.
Aim to shower during a flight layover. This is the one trick that makes flying long-distance more bearable, allowing you to recharge physically and mentally. Aim to fly your way to a frequent flyer status, but if not, it’s often worth paying for a lounge if there’s a shower included. Use the LoungeReview app to see what amenities each airport lounge has.
Search Atlas Obscura to discover wonderful things to do. This long-running but little known directory lists over 30,000 extraordinary and wondrous places around the world. I can’t tell you how many fascinating little stories and places we’ve discovered through this excellent website. Explore Atlas Obscura here.
Use AllTrails to find great walks. My husband and I are passionate hikers and often build trips around the best hikes in a region, but even if you’re a more casual walker, AllTrails is the best app to find reviews of good walks all around you. It makes it easy to download the map and help you navigate your way through the hike. It’s one of the apps I genuinely can’t live with. You can sign up for a free account using my referral code and AllTrails will plant a tree for each of us (that is pretty cool). Join AllTrails here.
Look up Accidentally Wes Anderson to find Insta-worthy locations. Another great resource to find visually stunning locations to explore as you’re travelling. Often quirky, usually off-the-beaten-track and always in the unique visual style of Wes Anderson that wouldn’t look out of place in one of his movies. Search Accidentally Wes Anderson's Map here.
Add hearts to your Google Maps. My husband is the ultimate researcher, and has taught me many nifty travel tips. As you start researching your trip, add every potential restaurant, bar, museum and shop as a ‘heart’ on your personal Google Maps. Once you have enough you’ll start to notice patterns of which areas have the most interesting locations in them, and that will help you navigate the city (as well as showing you the best place to look for accomodation). Ben has done this so often that he’s about to hit the Google Maps limit of 10,000 hearts on his global map (!). Amazingly, this means that no matter where we are in the world, we are never far from excellent things to do and places to eat.
Download the Michelin Guide to find great meals. The biggest misconception about the Michelin Awards is that it’s always for fancy food, however they have other awards, like Bib Gourmand, that recognises restaurants serving high-quality food at moderate prices. For example, in Spain these places need to offer a three-course meal for under AUD$60 per person. It’s a great way to follow your stomach around a new city. Use the Michelin Guide on the web here, then download the app for when you’re on the road.
Find the food app for where you’re travelling. Every country has its own version of the Michelin Guide. Australia has the Good Food Guide, and Italy has a version called the Osteria d’Italia app that lists local, family-run institutions that have been serving excellent, well-priced meals for decades. Search to find the one for your destination and you won’t regret it. If all else fails, Trip Advisor restaurants is an OK back-up (but I personally don’t really trust the taste of the reviewers!).
Always pay in local currency. When you use your credit card overseas and you’re given the option which currency to use, always choose the local currency option. That way your credit card company just does the conversion once, and avoids what’s known as dynamic currency conversion (DCC) which can range from 3% to 15% of a transaction cost on the spot.
Use AI as a travel guide. We now use Perplexity for every museum, gallery and historical site we visit. Simply take a photo of any artwork, or tell it what museum you’re in, and you’ll get a well-researched, fascinating audio guide to anywhere in the world. You can even use this AI prompt for best results: “You are a tour guide. You give historical contexts and excellent anecdotes and storytelling that helps bring a place to life. You tell me what to look out for that is context specific to the location we are in. Talk me without any headings. Tell me about……”
Use AI to help choose the best food and drinks. Take a photo of an entire restaurant menu, or wine list, and ask any AI program (like Perplexity or ChatGPT) to recommend you the most highly rated items, or to describe each of the wines. You can even explain your likes and dislikes, and it will give you the best recommendations designed just for you.
Find the best hotel bar in town. Every city has exceptional hotels to explore, but you usually only see inside the one place you’re staying. To enjoy the best of a city, seek out the coolest hotel bar (or two) and have a pre- or post-dinner drink there. It’s the best way to experience any amazing hotel without staying the night.
Currency convert with the iPhone calculator. The most recent update to the standard Apple calculator means you can do currency conversions directly on the go. It uses real-time rates and is always on your phone.
Go on an Airbnb Experience. Want to do something unique on your trip? Airbnb Experiences tend to have the most unique, and highly rated, tours in a city. There’s lots of variety, the quality is always high and we’ve had some of our most memorable experiences worldwide through this platform.
Get trusted recommendations from Amigo. If you want the best recommendations of where to eat, stay, drink and swim from tastemakers around the world, you should download Amigo. It’s a community of like-minded people you can follow who make seriously good suggestions when you travel.
Walk a city for “free”. To orientate yourself around a new place, join a “free” walking tour. They are technically called “free”, but you still tip the guides anything from $15 to $40 depending on how much you enjoyed it. This is still a lot less than other tours, and we’ve found the guides all surprisingly great in different cities. You can find and book them the best ones through GuruWalk.
Things to travel with
Get a great backpack. I’ve had various types of small backpacks, and keep returning to the Cotopaxi Allpa 28L Travel Pack as my favourite. I take it on the plane as my carry-on (it fits under all seats if needed), for long-weekends and have even taken it in some short multi-day hikes. It has thick padded straps, and zips open right in the middle so you can pack it easily and access all the different compartments. It’s not perfect for everyone, but it’s amazing for what we need.
Buy a toothbrush case. There’s nothing worse than a wet and soggy toothbrush flailing around in your toiletries bag (this is the stylish and practical one I use) to make for an unhygienic moment when you put it in your mouth. The solution is a small plastic sleeve that keeps your toothbrush clean and will be the cheapest thing you take with you, yet also one of the most useful.
Declutter your cords with 3-in-1s. Instead of travelling with multiple charging cords, look for a multi-use one with several different ends. We use one that has USB and USB-C on one end, with the other end capable of charging our phone, camera and Kindle at the same time (albeit slowly).
Never leave home without packing cubes. There’s no better way to organise your bag when you pack, plus your wardrobe when you arrive, than a few well-sized packing cubes to keep everything neat and tidy.
Put your shaver inside a silicon holder. Any traveller would be familiar with all-too-common cuts that come from reaching into your toiletry bag and accidentally slicing the tip of your finger with your razor. It can be alleviated with a simple razor protector case that will soon become indispensable. This is the simple one I use.
Noise cancelling headphone will save you. Buy one good pair, like Bose travel headphones, and they’ll last for years. I can’t travel without them, and they can turn even the loudest baby next to you into a distant noise. I have used this same pair for over 10 years and they have never failed me (the battery still lasts 10+ hours of listening), but in researching this post I disocvered they stopped making them almost a decade ago! So choose whichever pair best works for you.
Carry clear bags with you. Japanese retailer Muji sells clear plastic pouches that you can store your small liquids for the plane, or to see your medication clearly. We always travel with several of them, you can pick them up here.
Get a travel pillow. Yes, I know, I’m getting older. One of my non-negotiables when I move around so much is a good night’s sleep. Everyone likes a different type of pillow. I like low and flat with little ‘inflation’, so I now travel with my own small pillow to use as a back-up if there’s a balloon waiting for me in my Airbnb or hotel. I love the Therm-A-Rest compressible travel pillow. It uses small pieces of foam that squeeze into the size of a Pringle can to travel, then expands over an hour into a surprisingly comfortable pillow.
Use wet bags and dry bags. For every day trip, scuba dive, beach day, snorkel or boat we go on, we always have a dry bag (ie. to put dry items like books and camera into) and a wet bag (for towels, swimmers and snorkel). The dry bag is usually a backpack, but the wet bag is this cheap mesh beach tote. It lets sand and water drip out easily, and is big enough to fit multiple snorkels, fins, towels and wet swimmers on.
AirTags are your friend. They have saved me numerous times, like the time a lost bag was being driven away from the airport right I was heading towards there pick it up from. You really need AirTags for each piece of luggage you check-in.
If you’ve made it this far, you’re going to have an excellent next holiday! It took a while to compile all of these, but we wanted to share some of our learned wisdom with you. Please share this with someone you want to go travelling with this year :)
Continuing the travelling theme, we’re now in Malaga enjoying Southern Spain from home. After a quick trip to London last week to do some talks for my book, the rain in Europe has finally moved on and it’s amazing how different mainland Spain is from Mallorca. It really feels like a different country.
I’m loving writing my weekly column for the SMH and The Age that you can read here. I’m almost a year into it, with just a few weeks off over Christmas, and there are so many interesting story angles to write about every week.
Hope you found this travel edition of OUTLET useful.
Until next month,
- Tim
All great tips! I try to keep things simple…and I do most of what you suggest always travel Delta and SkyTeam which fits my destinations, try to keep status, for lounge access, also use the Schwab debit card which uses the currency of the country, I need my phone for work abroad so I use the Verizon passport which is unlimited everywhere for $10/day, etc…can’t use VPN because it blocks all banking most US govt website access etc…But I use cellular bandwidth and tethering which protects more than WiFi…But I really have to try Tripit! thanks for sharing!!! 🩶
Tim/Ben. As you know, I am a seasoned, adventurous (and occasional lux) traveller. I also give talks on travel trends when I am speaking on Seabourn and Regent Seven Seas. This list is a stunner, and I have discovered a lot of very useful info. So many fresh ideas.